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 Turning to his unpublished archive, Miranda Yousef’s engrossing documentary portrait unveils the dark shadows that lurked within the self-titled “painter of light”.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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Killer Heat review – overcooked Jo Nesbø adaptation is deathly dull

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Shailene Woodley star in a very boring murder mystery streaming on Amazon

What might seem like a relatively easy ask on paper – the director of a buzzy festival hit adapting a Jo Nesbø short story with three likable and attractive actors set on the camera-ready island of Crete – has become a bizarrely effortful slog in the misshape of Killer Heat, a dull and predictable sunshine noir that wastes the time of those involved as well as ours.

Originally known as the far more appealing The Jealousy Man in print, the anonymously retitled mystery plays less like a real movie and more like a case-of-the-week episode of an ITV crime drama (without credits it’s not even 90 minutes long). Joseph Gordon-Levitt, revisiting similar yet considerably lesser territory to his role in Rian Johnson’s stylish 2005 thriller Brick, plays a run-of-the-mill private detective named Nick who is called to investigate a seemingly cut-and-dried death on a Greek island. Leo (Richard Madden) has fallen off a steep mountain edge while free-climbing, a reckless accident to most but to his sister-in-law Penelope (Gordon-Levitt’s Snowden co-star Shailene Woodley), it looks like murder. She’s married to his identical twin brother and at the mercy of his wealthy, and dangerous, family.

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