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 Turning to his unpublished archive, Miranda Yousef’s engrossing documentary portrait unveils the dark shadows that lurked within the self-titled “painter of light”.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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Mountainhead review – tech bros face off in Jesse Armstrong’s post-Succession uber-wealth satire

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Weapons-grade zingers come thick and fast in this chamber piece about four plutocrats on a weekend in a lodge that goes awry when the planet descends into chaos

Jesse Armstrong has returned with what feels like a horribly addictive feature-length spin-off episode from the extended Succession Cinematic Universe – though without Succession cast members. It is set in a luxurious Utah megalodge which winds up resembling the Dr Strangelove war room, mixed with the apartment from Hitchcock’s Rope. Mountainhead is a super-satirical chamber piece about the deranged, cynical and facetious mindset of the uber-wealthy, the kind of people who think about ancient Rome every day, though not about Nero and his violin. It may not have the dramatic richness of Armstrong’s TV meisterwerk while the pure testosterone of this all-male main cast (minus any Shiv figure) is oppressive – though that is kind of the point. The pure density of weapons-grade zingers in the script is a marvel.

Our heroes are four unspeakable American tech plutocrats, a billionaire boys club with one mere centi-millionaire who isn’t up to “bill” status; this beta-male cuck of their peer group is nicknamed “Soup Kitchen” because of his poverty, and he is their eager host. They are exactly the kind of people with whom legacy media aristocrat Logan Roy (played in Succession by Brian Cox) would once grit his teeth and take meetings, vainly hoping for investment. These masters of the universe are getting together for an alpha bros’ hang-slash-poker-weekend, razzing and bantering with each other with deadly seriousness about their respective wealth levels, at this mega-lodge that is called Mountainhead. As one guest asks: “Is that like The Fountainhead? Your interior designer is Ayn Bland …?”

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