Reviews of the Bosch

Van Gogh is alluded to on a couple occasions in the movie Basquiat  by Julian Schnabel -twenty-two years before Schnabel would put his stamp on the story of the most famous tortured artist with At Eternity’s Gate . From the start of his career as a filmmaker, he seemed to be building towards it -his predilection towards the lives of unconventional artists in turmoil beginning here in 1996. He himself of course was and is a successful painter -he had a lens into that subject that other filmmakers might lack. And  Basquiat is set within a world he occupied -the art scene of late 80s New York, coloured by a postmodernist explosion, by Andy Warhol and his acolytes. But Jean-Michel Basquiat was more than that as Schnabel endeavours to show, and does a fine job emphasizing his distinctness even against a litany of tortured poets. Basquiat is played by Jeffrey Wright in his first leading role on film -a sensitive portrait of an eccentric man, a drug-addled high school dropout living ...