Christopher Knight
Los Angeles Times
The 2019 documentary "My Rembrandt," available for streaming, is less a film about the iconic 17th century Dutch painter of the film's title than it is an acute, often fascinating and occasionally puzzling rumination on aspects of the other titular word â "my."
One lesson of the film, ably helmed by director Oeke Hoogendijk, is that to love an artist's work is to possess it, whether physically, intellectually, emotionally or any combination thereof â including, perhaps, corruptly. Passion for an artist's work comes in many forms.
Hoogendijk knows her way around Dutch Golden Age painting and today's complicated cultural landscape, having spent a decade documenting the renovation and expansion of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam's incomparable repository. The success of that much-admired earlier film likely gave her unusual access to the art-world elite who open up in "My Rembrandt."