Art for Everybody review – the dark side of Thomas Kinkade, ‘painter of light’

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The extraordinarily popular painter of kitsch American scenes struggled with addiction and depression, as this documentary with access to his previously unseen works shows You won’t find the works of Thomas Kinkade lining the walls of the Museum of Modern Art, yet the painter, who died in 2012, is one of the best-selling artists in history and his paintings hang in tens of millions of American households. Kinkade’s typical subjects – rustic landscapes, sleepy cottages, quaint gazebos – bask in an idyllic calm, a luminous callback to a fabled simpler past. Turning to his unpublished archive, Miranda Yousef’s engrossing documentary portrait unveils the dark shadows that lurked within the self-titled “painter of light”. Through interviews with family members, close collaborators and critics, as well as Kinkade’s own words, the film traces his meteoric success in the 1980s and 90s. Shunned by the art world, he marketed his works through home-shopping television channels and a network of...
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Emergency viewing: 15 must-see films about the climate crisis

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These unflinching documentaries, indie thrillers and anime fables can help us to understand the climate emergency, and how to respond

We are rapidly becoming the all-star cast of the biggest disaster movie of all time, and tragically it’s a global success. Towering infernos blaze over Canada, the Canaries and Rhodes, Bangladesh, China and even northern England have had their own devastating Poseidon adventures while the whole world continues to reel in the socioeconomic chaos of the Covid contagion and in fear of an H1N1 outbreak. Only the dramatic effects are no longer computer-generated, they are real, and people are really dying.

I went to the Odeon in the 1970s and was terrified and wowed by the disaster film genre. Since the late 1980s I’ve been watching the real world’s climate effects department ramp up its protests to our wholesale inactivity and disregard for the science that says, with increasing accuracy, that humanity is facing Armageddon. But there’s been another competing genre, the conspiracy/disinformation movie, the creepy corrupt B-movies released, not by Hollywood, but by big oil, not X-rated at the multiplex but woven insidiously into our lives as extras in this catastrophe… and the repeats, re-streams, re-runs orchestrated by those fuelling the flames.

Chris Packham’s five-part series Earth is available on BBC iPlayer. The accompanying book, Earth: Over 4 Billion Years in the Making, by Chris Packham and Andrew Cohen is published by William Collins (£25)

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