A wonderfully immersive dive into the last days and lasting work of Vincent Van Gogh, Loving Vincent drops viewers into the midst of some of the master’s most famous paintings via a combination of live action and animation. You’ve gazed at “The Starry Night” on the page or, if you’ve been lucky, within its frame. This movie essentially puts you inside the painting, and lets you walk around in it. Led by co-directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, more than 100 painters integrated Van Gogh’s style with live-action footage—think Tower or A Scanner Darkly. And so the stars in “The Starry Night” pulse with life, while the leaves of the trees in “Rowing Boats on the Banks of the Oise” undulate in the wind. There is a narrative, in which a young man (Armand Roulin) tries to piece together the final hours before Van Gogh’s death by interviewing his friends and neighbors, and so often the iconic locations being recreated here serve as mere backdrop. But that, too, is magical; it’s as if you’re seeing these places in the everyday yet heightened way Van Gogh might have viewed them.
