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BBC News
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Warfare to Sinners: 10 of the best films of 2025 so far
BBC film critics Caryn James and Nicholas Barber pick their cinema highlights of the year so far, from a brutal war epic to an ambitious period vampire drama. Companion The sharpest American indie film of the year so far, Companion stars Jack Quaid and Sophie Thatcher as a devoted young couple who go to stay with some friends in a Russian tycoon's remote forest getaway. (Rupert Friend has a hilarious cameo as the mulleted oligarch.) As a drunken evening of confessions, suspicions and disagreements unfolds, it seems at first if the film might be a romantic comedy, or maybe a noirish thriller about a robbery gone wrong. In fact, Companion is a science-fiction comedy thriller – but beyond that, the less you know about the film in advance, the more enjoyable its many ingenious twists and turns will be. Suffice it to say that the big-screen debut of writer-director Drew Hancock is a sparklingly entertaining satire on modern technology and the never-more-relevant topic of how entitled and misogynistic certain insecure young men can be. And it packs all of its ideas into 97 minutes. (NB) Sinners As stunning as Ryan Coogler's Black Panther was, he has outdone himself with Sinners. Michael B Jordan is slyly convincing as twins named Smoke and Stack, who return from Chicago to their home town in Mississippi, in the Jim Crow South in 1932, to open a juke joint. With huge ambition and imagination, Coogler swirls familiar genres and tropes into a wholly original film that blurs the real and the supernatural. Sinners is a period piece as well as a vampire film. It is a drama about racism, family, superstition and spirituality, and it comes with passionate sex and exhilarating blues music. Coogler directs with brio, at times creating a phantasmagoria in which robed African musicians appear next to rappers. The first hour is so full of texture it could stand alone as a period film, but the supernatural eventually intrudes, leading to a finale of action, blood and vengeance. Jordan is surrounded by a superb supporting cast, including Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Musaku and Hailee Steinfeld. Sex, blues and vampires at the door? What more can anyone want from a film? (CJ) Art for Everybody Miranda Yousef's riveting documentary tells the stranger-than-fiction story of Thomas Kinkade, one of the biggest-selling artists in history. Critics dismissed his work as nauseatingly sickly, but in the 1990s and 2000s, there were shops all around the US devoted to Kinkade's sentimental pictures of cosy country cottages. Art for Everybody asks fascinating questions about who gets to decide what counts as legitimate art, and whether some paintings can be more moral than others – questions that resonate today, in light of the continuing culture wars in the US . But Yousef's delicately balanced and sensitive film is just as fascinating on personal issues as it is on sociopolitical ones. A key part of Kinkade's marketing was his carefully constructed public image as a devoutly Christian, all-American family man, and yet the so-called "Painter of Light" had a dark side, too. Did the pressures of being a squeaky-clean Dr Jekyll push him into becoming a self-destructive Mr Hyde? (NB) Warfare Alex Garland, the writer and director of Civil War, and Ray Mendoza, a veteran who was that film's military advisor, have created a harrowing, visceral, real-time drama that recreates an actual battle between Navy Seals and al-Qaeda jihadists. Garland's virtuoso technique and Mendoza's first-hand experience of war blend in a film of uncompromising focus, which plunges us into the intensity of combat without explanation or backstory. Yet the faces of Joseph Quinn, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis and D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai are enough to capture the fear and determination of being under siege. Creating characters far from the bravado of typical Hollywood war films, the actors depict courage in battle as a terror-filled endurance test. The film immerses us in that feeling. It is loud and intense, relentless in its barrage of grenades and gunfire, and when the cries of pain from the injured men start, they never stop. Warfare is a dazzling technical achievement but much more. Focusing on the personal cost of combat and violence itself rather than the politics of the Iraq conflict, it reinvents the war film with bracing freshness and immediacy. (CJ) Bring Them Down Barry Keoghan, Christopher Abbott and Colm Meaney star in this dark and bloody western-style thriller about a feud between sheep farmers in remote rural Ireland. Meaney and Abbott (who speak their dialogue in Irish) play a laconic father and son who lose their two prize rams, only to discover that they have been stolen by their neighbour's shiftless son (Keoghan). Accusations are made, simmering resentments reach boiling point, and violence ensues – but then Christopher Andrews, the film's debut writer-director, rewinds his story and replays it from a revelatory new perspective. Suddenly, a hard-boiled story of crime and retribution becomes an aching tragedy about desperate economic hardship, youthful stupidity, male pride, and the traumas passed down from taciturn fathers to taciturn sons. Bring Them Down is tough to watch but it's beautifully shot, cleverly plotted and stunningly powerful. (NB) Misericordia Alain Guiraudie's (Stranger by the Lake) engaging film is full of surprises. It starts as a drama about Jeremie, a young man returning to his small village in the lush French countryside for a funeral, then becomes a quietly comic take on desire along with a thriller about covering up a murder. The film deftly carries the audience with it through all these turns. Jeremie is an opportunist but also an enigma. He may have had a passion for his former boss and mentor, the village baker, who died. The baker's widow definitely seems interested in Jeremie, who grew up as the best friend of her son, Vincent; he now angrily suspects Jeremie of wanting to sleep with his mother. Jeremie does not want that but he does find himself in a reluctant affair with the local priest. The joke is that so many people lust after the unremarkable Jeremie, and the suspense comes from the small-town eyes and local police wondering what happened when Vincent mysteriously disappears. Misericordia (Latin for mercy) was nominated for eight Cesar awards, the French equivalent of the Oscars, including film and director, but its human comedy lands easily with audiences everywhere. (CJ) Holy Cow Deep in the leafy French countryside, a scruffy teenage layabout Totone (Clément Faveau) has to look after his younger sister Claire (Luna Garret) after the sudden death of their father. His answer to their dire financial problems? Making award-winning luxury cheese. Louise Courvoisier's debut film is a heart-tugging coming-of-age drama, rooted in the soil of the Jura region where she grew up. She offers an earthy insider's view of how strenuous life can be for agricultural workers, and how wrenching it is when carefree youth turns to relentless, responsible adulthood. But she also fashions a warm, romantic, gorgeously scenic and ultimately hopeful tale of underdogs working together in the sunshine to improve their lives. Blessed are the cheesemakers, as Monty Python once put it. (NB) The Friend A giant, sloppy Great Dane tugs Naomi Watts around the streets of Manhattan, but by the end of this lovely film about affection and grief the physical comedy with the dog seems the least of it. Watts smoothly play Iris, a creative writing teacher whose best friend, Walter, a famous womanising author, kills himself. He leaves her his dog, Apollo, even though she lives in a one-room apartment in a pet-free building. Dealing with Apollo becomes a way for Iris to grapple with her feelings of love and loss for Walter, played by Bill Murray in flashback scenes filled with such wit and tenderness that they have a great impact in spite of his minimal screen time. Based on Sigrid Nunez's eloquent, acclaimed 2018 novel, the film was directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, whose films include the underrated Montana Story (2021) with Haley Lu Richardson and Owen Teague. Avoiding mawkish clichés, they have created a gem of a film that is funny and touching whether you are a pet lover or not. Come for the rambunctious Great Dane, stay for the beautifully rendered emotions. (CJ) Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl Aardman's two greatest heroes are back – and so is their sneakiest ever adversary, a diabolical penguin named Feathers McGraw. Directed by Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham, the Oscar-nominated Vengeance Most Fowl is chock-full of the qualities that make Wallace & Gromit's farcical adventures so cherished: the painstaking stop-motion claymation, the Heath Robinson-style gadgetry, the winking homages to classic cinema, the gleefully silly British humour, and the deep affection for the characters and their world. Above all, it a treat to see Feathers McGraw, more than 30 years after he was introduced in The Wrong Trousers. But there is more to the Bristol-based studio's new film than the nostalgic whimsy you would expect. When Wallace invents a robotic garden gnome that does all of Gromit's favourite gardening jobs (and that's even before it turns evil), the story takes a canalboat trip into Mission: Impossible territory by addressing fears about artificial intelligence. (NB) On Becoming a Guinea Fowl The immensely talented director Rungano Nyoni, whose I Am Not a Witch (2017) won a Bafta for outstanding British debut, makes artful, accessible films of great visual panache. Her latest is a clear-eyed drama about cultural and generational conflict. The heroine, Shula, is a cosmopolitan woman recently returned from the city to her village in Zambia. Nyoni conveys this dissonance at once, as Shula drives home from a costume party dressed in a glittery silver helmet and dark glasses (an homage to a Missy Elliott video) and finds her Uncle Fred dead on a dirt road. As the story takes us into the family's traditional funeral rituals, it slowly reveals that Shula and two cousins had been abused by Fred as children, a reality their mothers put aside as they mourn their brother. Nyoni's style is realistic even as she drops in surreal images. The narrative about secrecy and the trauma of sexual assault builds in power right to the end, when Shula recalls a children's television programme and the title of this stunning film finally makes sense. (CJ) -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Los Angeles Times
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In the documentary ‘Art for Everybody,' the dark side of a ‘Painter of Light' is exposed
If you think you've never seen a painting by Thomas Kinkade, think again. The late artist, who is said to have sold more canvases than any painter in history, created a cottage industry (pun intended) of ubiquitous, mass-produced art with his blissful landscapes, idyllic street scenes and cozy cottage tableaus. But the beatific, charismatic painter, who developed a rock-star following, was not all that he seemed. Miranda Yousef, in her feature directing debut, deftly takes on Kinkade's timely and intriguing story in the documentary 'Art for Everybody,' an absorbing, smartly assembled portrait of the mega rise and tragic fall of the Jekyll-and-Hyde-like artist. Kinkade's enormous 1990s-era success, which saw his work reproduced on everything from collectible plates to La-Z-Boy loungers, dovetailed with the period's culture war against the sexualization of art. The born-again Kinkade stepped into that breach, doubled down on the family values bit and became known as a creator of images that the Christian community, among other groups, could embrace. But how much of this was opportunism and how much was true belief? Yousef, who also edited the film, vividly dissects the artist's complicated life with the help of strong archival and personal footage as well as candid interviews with family members, colleagues and a solid array of art-world figures. She first tracks Kinkade from his impoverished Placerville, Calif., youth to his late-1970s days as a bohemian art student at UC Berkeley and Pasadena's ArtCenter College of Design, followed by his work as a background artist for Ralph Bakshi's 1983 animated fantasy 'Fire and Ice.' (Bakshi, now 86, enthuses here about Kinkade's talent and work ethic.) Kinkade's nascent pieces were often dark and provocative. But it was his move into painting — specifically his signature bucolic pastels with their near-heavenly lighted windows and skies — that would lead him and business partner Ken Raasch to create an art empire that, at its peak, reportedly brought in more than $100 million in annual sales. Kinkade's eponymous mall stores and QVC appearances were among his many lucrative outlets. He was dubbed the 'Painter of Light,' even though British artist J.M.W. Turner first claimed that title in the early 1800s. But from a sheer artistic point of view, was Kinkade's work any good? Or was it simply middlebrow kitsch? Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight, who offers several unvarnished opinions here, asserts that Kinkade 'had a quite outsized cultural impact with really bad art.' Of his famed cottage paintings, Knight calls them 'a cliché piled upon a fantasy piled upon a bad idea. That cottage is where the Wicked Witch lives… I'm not going in there.' Journalist and author Susan Orlean ('The Orchid Thief'), who profiled Kinkade for a 2001 New Yorker article that lends this documentary its title, considers his output 'very sentimental, a little garish and kind of twee,' despite its admittedly broad appeal. Yet Kinkade, often seen in the film's clips as confident and ebullient with a kind of evangelist's fervor, pushes back against the naysayers by contending, 'All great art is not about art — all great art is about life.' And he took that belief to the bank, literally. But it's recent interviews with Kinkade's wife, Nanette (they married in 1982), and their four millennial daughters — Merritt, Chandler, Winsor and Everett — that provide the doc's emotional heft and shed valuable light on the tumultuous man behind the serene paintings. Yousef masterfully carries us along from the women's happier memories of Kinkade as a devoted family man to someone whose work and fame began to supplant the needs of his wife and kids. His family says he could be 'manic' and 'hard to connect with' and, from a few behind-the-scenes clips of Kinkade at promotional events, he seemed to treat his then-small daughters like props for the cameras. In addition, the artist comes off as smarmy and contentious at times, belying his 'holy man' persona and populist vibe. From around 2006 to 2010, a series of major business downturns, including a bankruptcy filing and several key lawsuits, led Kinkade into a downward spiral of troubling public behavior and substance abuse. (Footage showing Kinkade's compulsive need for booze is unsettling.) His family, angry and fearful, even staged an intervention to force the former teetotaler into rehab. Though he reluctantly went, the therapy didn't take. He died in 2012, at age 54, from an accidental overdose of alcohol and Valium. Ultimately, the centerpiece of the film is the Kinkade daughters' posthumous discovery of a vault that houses a trove of their father's unseen, artistically challenging work, much of which shows an underside that few people knew — or could have ever imagined. The women's reexamination of their complex dad's demons and flaws, vis-à-vis these unearthed creations, proves illuminating and poignant. Among the doc's other interview subjects are former Times investigative reporter Kim Christensen, who wrote several articles about Kinkade's legal troubles, which included art gallery fraud; Kinkade's college girlfriend, who recalls his sometimes hostile, dualistic nature; and artist Jeffrey Vallance, who curated the only major survey exhibition of Kinkade's work, held in 2004 at Cal State Fullerton's Grand Central Art Center.
Washington Post
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A new documentary continues the Thomas Kinkade art hustle
'This is where I'm putting my retirement money,' says a woman in a brief but infuriating scene from the new documentary 'Art for Everybody,' about the life and downfall of the enormously popular kitsch artist Thomas Kinkade. She is standing at a table groaning with reproductions of Kinkade's trademark images, such as quaint cottages and homey cabins nestled in landscapes of cotton-candy pink and robin's-egg blue, with golden sunsets or silvery moonlight glinting on clear, placid waters.
BBC News
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'Banal and hollow': Why the quaint paintings of Thomas Kinkade divided the US
Beloved by many, despised by others, Thomas Kinkade's quaint rustic scenes and his wholesome image belied a dark and tortured story that contrasts with his 'sugary' artworks. Thomas Kinkade was one of the best-selling artists in history, as well as one of the most divisive. When he died in 2012, the American painter had been rocked by business problems, but at his commercial peak a decade earlier, his company was bringing in more than $100m a year. And yet his work was despised by many critics – not because it was blasphemous or obscene, but because, well, he specialised in quaint pictures of thatched-roof rural cottages nestling in leafy groves. "Thomas Kinkade's style is illustrative saccharine fantasy rather than art with which you can connect at any meaningful level," Charlotte Mullins, the author of A Little History of Art, tells the BBC. "It is schmaltzy pastiches of Disney-style woodland scenes, complete with cutesy animals and fairy tale cottages. They are… like the images you find on cheap greetings cards – sugary and forgettable." And compared to some critics, Mullins is being polite. These critics don't just consider Kinkade's paintings to be nauseatingly sickly, they detect something disturbing and ominous about them. In her 2003 book on California, Where I Was From, Joan Didion summed up his art by saying. "It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent cosiness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire." As harsh as that sounds, Didion may have been more perceptive than she realised. Art for Everybody, a new documentary directed by Miranda Yousef, shows that the man who called himself the "Painter of Light" did indeed have a dark side. "His branding was so effective that you didn't know there was this really complicated and I would say tortured artist behind it all," Yousef tells the BBC. "He lived a Greek tragedy of a life." The documentary features audio tapes recorded by Kinkade when he was a long-haired, bohemian-looking art student in California in the 1970s – and even then, he was already fretting over the question of whether he could make an impact as an artist while making a decent living. After a stint in Hollywood, painting backgrounds for Ralph Bakshi's 1983 animated feature film, Fire and Ice, he concentrated on idealised, nostalgic American landscapes, and he and his wife Nanette sold reproductions of them outside a local grocer's shop. In the 1990s, he took the idealism and the nostalgia to new heights, and swapped his rugged vistas for soft-focus pastoral scenes that a Hobbit might deem a bit on the twee side. Old-fashioned lampposts and cottage windows glowed. Streams twinkled beneath slender stone footbridges. Bushes burst with pastel flowers. And cash registers rang. Kinkade didn't sell the paintings themselves, but the hazy idylls they depicted were soon being printed on collectible plates advertised in newspapers and magazines. For many Americans, they were comforting refuges from the modern world. In Art for Everybody, Christopher Knight, the art critic of the Los Angeles Times, is contemptuous of Kinkade's imagery. "It's a cliché piled upon a fantasy piled upon a bad idea," he says. "The colour is juiced and the light coming from inside those cottages is intense and blaring." Just as importantly, as far as his critics were concerned, Kinkade's pictures had nothing to them beyond their superficial decorative qualities. "They are banal and hollow, with no intent to say anything meaningful," says Mullins. "Today we would think they had been produced by AI – designed as if by algorithm to a certain formula." But Yousef insists that Kinkade's skill can't be discounted. "There were actually other people who were painting cottages and Christmas scenes and putting them on plates and all that stuff," she notes, "and the thing is that Kinkade's were so much better. His works just blew everybody else's out of the water." She also believes that Kinkade's paintings, rather than being wholly market-led, were linked to his childhood in Placerville, California, where he was raised by his single mother and only intermittently saw his violent father. "It's a common criticism that his cottages look like they're on fire on the inside. And then you learn that it was because when he was growing up it was always cold and dark in the house when he got home, because they didn't have the money to keep the heat and the lights on. He was painting the thing that he wanted." Kinkade's deprived upbringing, says Yousef, didn't just inspire his choice of subject matter, but drove him to make as much money as he could. He and his business partners printed pictures on an industrial scale, as well as putting his immediately recognisable imagery on furniture and ornaments, and selling them on the QVC shopping network. They also set up hundreds of faux olde worlde Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries in shopping malls around the US, and trademarked the "Painter of Light" brand. Again, Yousef doesn't see Kinkade as entirely calculating. Having grown up in a house with no pictures on the walls, "He sincerely believed that art should be accessible to everyone." Behind the fantasy Whatever you thought of the paintings, the mass-marketing of the work of a single artist was certainly groundbreaking. In interviews at the time, Kinkade asserted that he was no different from an author selling stacks of novels or a musician selling CDs. He even declared that by industrialising his output, he was doing what Andy Warhol had always dreamt of. But Mullins argues that Kinkade was being "obfuscatory and disingenuous" by churning out reproductions by the thousand, paying his assistants to add a few dabs of paint here and there, and then selling these prints for thousands of dollars, as if they were rare and precious works of art. "Prints offer an affordable way of buying art by great artists," she says. "They retain their value through the limited nature of the edition. This was never Kinkade's strategy." Still, this sort of disagreement between Kinkade and his critics was one of his selling points. Art for Everybody features news reports and promotional videos, in which he tells adoring audiences that his art could be understood and appreciated by everyone, whereas only the snooty elite could see anything artistic about Chris Ofili putting elephant dung on his canvases, or Tracey Emin presenting her unmade bed to gallery-goers. "This is not legitimate art," he proclaimed. As much a televangelist as a painter, Kinkade was a born-again Christian who assured his devotees that buying his work put them on the right side of a political and spiritual line separating them from decadent metropolitan tastemakers. He trademarked the sobriquet "Painter of Light", not just because of all the sunlit clouds and fiery cottages in his pictures, but to signify that he was a force for virtue and Christianity. "The art world is a world of darkness today," he thundered. He, in contrast, was "someone who stands up for family and God and country and beauty". A doughy, plaid shirt-wearing fellow with a thick moustache, he often appeared on television with his blonde wife and his four blonde daughters: the embodiment of wholesome, traditional, all-American values. His fans weren't just paying for his pictures; they were paying to associate themselves with this proudly conservative persona. But that persona, like the pictures themselves, was more a fantasy that Kinkade wished for than an accurate representation of reality. He was prone to swearing after the directors of his mawkishvideos called "cut". He relied on alcohol to cope with work pressures. And, in the documentary, his daughters say that they were encouraged to smile in videos and personal appearances, but often felt as if their father cared more about his career than about them. "Thomas Kinkade and his persona and his brand really cast an extraordinarily long, dark shadow over his entire family," says Yousef, "and there was a lot wrapped up in perpetuating the brand and preserving it." More like this:• The surprising story of Van Gogh's guardian angel• Five ways to spot a fake masterpiece• Eight images that tell the story of America In order to maintain this brand and the vast business empire that went with it, Kinkade had to present himself as a Christian paragon, and he had to complete a stylistically identical painting every month. That meant that he had to suppress other, more conflicted parts of his psyche. The strain became too much. In the mid-2000s, Kinkade fell out with his business partners, and had legal battles with gallery franchisees. He reinvented himself as a womanising, hard-drinking hellraiser. After some interventions by his friends and family, some time in rehab, and the collapse of his marriage, he died of an accidental overdose of alcohol and diazepam at the age of 54. It was only after his death that his family sorted through the vault containing his artwork, and uncovered a stash of bleak, violent drawings and paintings that seemed to express his inner rage and fear in a way that his cottage paintings never could: a shack in the middle of nowhere on a murky night; a nun pointing a gun at herself; giant monsters and distorted faces. Art for Everybody raises the questions of whether these pictures are more authentic than the ones the public knew about. Do they express how Kinkade really felt about his difficult upbringing and his frightening father? Would it have been healthier for him to explore the shadowy netherworlds in these pictures instead of shutting himself inside his stifling sylvan cottages, year after year? And were his critics right to say that his famous paintings were disturbing all along? "One of the things that was obvious early on," says Yousef, "was that his fans had a two-dimensional view of him and his critics had another completely different two-dimensional view of him. I knew there was a three-dimensional person in there somewhere, and that's what I wanted to try to find." In some ways, Kinkade was ahead of his time. First, he was a culture warrior before culture wars were being fought as fiercely as they are now. As someone who claimed that he was taking a stand for Christianity and patriotism and against the intellectual elite, he was staking out territory occupied by more and more in the US today. He was also ahead of his time as an artist with such a brazen commercial side. "Today we're seeing all these artist collabs," says Yousef. "There's Yayoi Kusama who's working with Louis Vuitton, and Tom Sachs is working with Nike, and Kehinde Wiley is doing a collab with American Express, whereas you see in the movie an MBNA bank card with a Thomas Kinkade painting on it. He was already doing it 20 or 30 years ago." Finally, by calling himself the Painter of Light, and by trading on his pious family-man persona, Kinkade turned himself into a kind of product. "Look at where we are today with social media, and everybody being a brand," says Yousef. "He was really ahead of his time with that. But I think that one of the big questions of the film is, what are the costs of turning yourself into a brand?" In Kinkade's case, the costs were unbearably high. Art for Everybody is released on 28 March in the US. --
The Guardian
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘A modern-day Greek tragedy': the life and death of artist Thomas Kinkade
Thirteen years after his death from an overdose of alcohol and valium, the American painter Thomas Kinkade's brand lives on. The original Thomas Kinkade store in Carmel, California, still operates, and the official Kinkade Instagram account has a tidy, if modest, 67,000 followers. A recent partnership with Disney features, among other things, a 16-month calendar showing some of the Disney empire's best-known faces in fantastical landscapes. Still, this is but a shadow of the massive, multimedia Kinkade operation that reportedly netted over $2bn in total retail sales in 2004, licensing its images to everything from plates to calendars to greeting cards to actual Thomas Kinkade cottages that fans could live in. If you happened to be a sentient human being during the 1990s and 2000s, chances are you have at least some cultural memory of this artist who was as ubiquitous as could be. (Kinkade was fond of bragging that he reached the heights of everywhereness that Andy Warhol could only dream of.) The veteran film editor Miranda Yousef's first feature, Art for Everybody, attempts to document Kinkade's startling rise to fame and ultimate fall, examining the artist from as many angles as possible. 'One of my guiding lights is that you have to love your subject,' she told me in a video interview. 'You can see in the film if a film-maker is contemptuous of the subject, and that gets in the way of telling a good and true story.' Yousef was drawn to Kinkade's story for being what she termed 'a modern-day Greek tragedy' as well as for how it engaged numerous questions vital to the tastemaking cultural battlefields – among them, what is art and who gets to decide, the politicization of taste, and the cost of turning yourself into a brand. She felt determined to fully flesh out this person who she knew from her teenage years and who had largely become flattened by the media coverage of his life. 'I grew up in Massachusetts, and Kinkade was in the malls, he was in the ether, he was just everywhere,' Yousef told me. 'I knew there was more to this story because this person had this whole collection of unseen works that was completely different than what we knew of him. I knew there was a 3D person in there somewhere.' Arguably Kinkade's most prescient stroke was how he turned himself into a brand, obtaining a kind of quasi-influencer status years before there were social media networks capable of delivering fame and fortune. He reached his ubiquity the old fashioned way, through brick-and-mortar stores, a PBS TV show à la Bob Ross, endless merchandising opportunities, and an unbelievable hustle ethic. He even trademarked the 'Painter of Light' moniker for himself. (Yousef does point out that the British Romantic artist JMW Turner beat him to that nickname by a good 150 years.) But there was a dark side to his success – he was an alcoholic, was accused of multiple instances of sexual harassment, and even lost a $3m court case to Thomas Kinkade gallery operators for defrauding them. In giving so much of himself up to his personal brand, Kinkade did not exorcise his personal demons but rather made them stronger. 'The film is about how denying yourself full self-expression will destroy you,' Yousef said. 'Kinkade is almost a textbook definition of that. He built this empire around this personal brand, but it was almost a gilded cage, and he couldn't keep up.' And, as Yousef points out in Art for Everybody, the art that Kinkade made was decidedly white and heteronormative, bending toward a Christian nationalist nostalgia that may have fed the yearning for an earlier, simpler time that has been exploited by the Maga movement. Yousef explained to me that she tried hard to find people of color to present in Art for Everybody, but was largely unable to do so. 'His consumer base was not exclusively white, but it was overwhelmingly white,' she told me. True to these scandals and the ultimate bankruptcy of his empire, Kinkade has taken a beating in the press, and Yousef views her film as an act of 'rehumanizing' the artist. She goes into his backstory, which involves an alternatively abusive and absent father, as well as a childhood home devoid of anything resembling art, so he made his own. In her telling, Kinkade wanted everyone to feel the solace that art brought to him. 'He had this need and desire to have art on the walls of his home,' Yousef said. 'It's a universal feeling, he really felt like art should be for everybody, and that was part of his excitement surrounding this whole business idea.' Yousef also gives plenty of screen time to Kinkade's fans, who were legion. 'We had a van that was filled top to bottom with fan letters,' she told me. 'There were all these people reaching out to say 'your art helped me.'' Art for Everybody features some of these letters directly, including one heartfelt missive that credited Kinkade's paintings for helping to get over the loss of a sister, and another written by a sibling of a student murdered in the Columbine high school mass shooting who found solace in Kinkade's work. These testaments to the millions who felt a special connection to their Thomas Kinkade art are juxtaposed with a number of art critics, including the New Yorker's Susan Orlean and the Pulitzer prize winner Christopher Knight, who are given plenty of space to knock Kinkade's contribution to the art world. (Orlean once wrote that she bet the artist $1m that he'd never have a show in a major art museum in his lifetime.) Yousef also gains access to a family vault of art from Kinkade's pre–Painter of Light era, filled with things that gain the approval of Orlean and Knight in a satisfying third act reveal. In that way, Art for Everybody makes the implicit argument that you can either make art that will win over the establishment or that will win over the greater population, but you can't make both – in one telling scene, the successful Kinkade walks through an art school class, dismissing one student after another for making interesting work with no sales potential. Yousef also counterpoints Kinkade's easy-to-love work with a few controversial pieces of capital-A art, such as Andres Serrano's infamous photograph Piss Christ, which are compelling and even beautiful in their way, but that completely outrage Kinkade's Christian fanbase. She believes that moving beyond these kinds of divisive arguments is crucial to the future of American society. 'If there's one thing I want for people to take away from the film, it's the importance of viewing others with nuance and compassion,' she said. 'I feel like political forces and the social media landscape and all of these things are conspiring to encourage us to dehumanize each other. It's really important to rehumanize each other, because that's the only way we're going to move forward as a society.' One can't help but walk away from Art for Everybody feeling that Kinkade built up a billion-dollar empire in a fruitless attempt to satisfy the father that could never approve of him, and that he would have been better off processing all of that trauma through the sort of interesting but largely unsellable artworks that he produced earlier in his life. Instead, he ended up making paintings that hit the same note over and over in a way that is undeniably pleasing and eye-catching, but that feels like taking a hit of chocolate when what you really need is a therapy session. Art for Everybody does an admirable job of giving Kinkade an enormously fair treatment and interrogating the many questions implicated by his American tragedy. As much as anything, the movie is a cautionary tale to anyone thirsting for fame: be careful what you wish for, it just might end up controlling you. 'It was too much, he couldn't give it up,' Youself told me. 'Imagine being like, my business is bringing in $100m per year and everywhere I go are these cheering crowds. That's not easy for anybody to give up.' Art for Everybody is playing at New York's Firehouse Cinema from 28 March with a digital release to follow
