Toronto. Nightwatching.

Hello, distributors: Stroke while the brush is wet. With The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art open through January 6, Rembrandt is very much on our minds. See, for example, Holland Carter's personal tour in the New York Times, alongside an audio tour, a note on New York's "other rich holdings in Dutch 17th-century art, some on permanent view, some not," and a reading list. Then there's Julian Bell's piece in the new issue of the New York Review of Books on the exhibition catalogue, Gary Schwartz's The Rembrandt Book and Michael Taylor's Rembrandt's Nose: Of Flesh and Spirit in the Master's Portraits.

How about a little synergistic action, distributors (or, for that matter, NYFF programmers)? Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching has just added a few more favorable notices to the generally thumbs-up reviews from Venice.

"[I]t was with enormous trepidation that I decided to give Greenaway another chance with Nightwatching," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "Finally, finally, finally, here's a biopic about an artist that actually reflects in a substantive way about his art! For that, and [Martin] Freeman's surprisingly robust performance, I'll give it a pass."

"A welcome return to form for a man who seemed hopelessly mired in the formalism of multi-screen, hyper-texted images, Nightwatching has a surprisingly conventional narrative that concentrates on Rembrant's heartbreaking devotion to his wife - and yet never lacks for the thematic complexity of the artistic process that the eminently theatrical and wildly cinematic director's best films exemplify," writes Stephen Garrett for indieWIRE.

"The staging is both highly theatrical - like much of Greenaway's work - but also thoroughly cinematic," writes Aaron Dobbs. "His storytelling may still lead to some moments of confusion, but the overall experience is fairly breathtaking."

Posted by dwhudson at September 22, 2007 4:37 AM