The New York Times by Manohla Dargis

By adamantly focusing above all else on van Gogh’s work — and its transporting ecstasies — Schnabel has made not just an exquisite film but an argument for art.

Film Threat by Lorry Kikta

It’s a beautiful visual and spiritual journey through the glorious highs and devastating lows of a brilliant artist who was ahead of his time.

Film Journal International by Erica Abeel

Schnabel's film is not so much about the artist as a journey into his inner being, so we experience the world in much the same blissed-out, tormented and chaotic way he himself did.

IndieWire by Michael Nordine

Schnabel fuses form and content in a way that’s rarely attempted and even more rarely achieved; in risking the same derision with which Van Gogh was sometimes met, he transcends the limitations of the conventional biopic and creates something that feels genuinely new.

Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer

One of the great achievements of this movie is that, in the end, Van Gogh’s words enter into our soul with the same force as the paintings.

The Playlist by Joe Blessing

Van Gogh (Willem Dafoe) is returned to his human dimensions, by a keen script and wonderful lead performance, while still being held up as an example of the artist’s ability to transcend time.

Variety by Owen Gleiberman

Schnabel, the director of “Before Night Falls” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” has stripped down his filmmaking in the most seductive way, all to achieve something audacious and elemental. He’s out to imagine what Vincent van Gogh was really like — to bask in van Gogh’s presence with an experiential, present-tense immediacy.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

Dafoe’s work, the look in his searching, despairing eyes, feels beyond conventional acting, using intuition as well as technique to go deeply into the character, putting us in Van Gogh’s presence.

New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein

I’m not a fan of Schnabel’s paintings, but I think he’s a born film painter, and even if At Eternity’s Gate doesn’t reliably cross the blood-brain barrier, his frames are like no one else’s. (His cinematographer is Benoît Delhomme.)

Austin Chronicle by Marjorie Baumgarten

Not enough can be said about Willem Dafoe’s amazing performance as van Gogh. It is some of the best work of his career.

TheWrap by William Bibbiani

Schnabel creates a natural, immersive motion picture that conveys the experience of being, living with, and painting like Vincent Van Gogh.

The Film Stage by Leonardo Goi

At Eternity’s Gate is a film made by an artist (“plates painter” Schnabel) less concerned with a painter, more with the way a painter saw the world. In its rupture from traditional biographical narratives, it does not merely stand out as unconventional biopic–it also comes close to resuscitating the idea of cinema as moving pictures.

Time by Stephanie Zacharek

Schnabel’s dream portrait of van Gogh is made whole by its star, Willem Dafoe, whose radiant intensity fills every corner of the film.

The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney

This is in many ways an abrasive, wildly uneven film — raw and deliberately unvarnished in style, shot by Benoit Delhomme with a nervous handheld camera and lots of wide-angle lenses that mirror the darting restlessness and the uneasy perspective of a troubled mind.

Screen Daily by Jonathan Romney

Despite a strong, affecting performance by Willem Dafoe – who, even more than Kirk Douglas or Pialat’s star Jacques Dutronc, looks born to the part – the director’s pugnacious visual and editing style never impart the kinetic emotional charge of his 2007 drama The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Screen International by Jonathan Romney

Despite a strong, affecting performance by Willem Dafoe – who, even more than Kirk Douglas or Pialat’s star Jacques Dutronc, looks born to the part – the director’s pugnacious visual and editing style never impart the kinetic emotional charge of his 2007 drama The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

Julian Schnabel has made a heartfelt if straightforwardly reverent film about the last years in the life of Vincent van Gogh – acted by with all the integrity and unselfconscious ease that you would expect from this great actor.

The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo

Does At Eternity’s Gate have anything new or innovative to share about perhaps the most comprehensively documented painter who’s ever lived? Does the world need another van Gogh biopic? Not really.

Slant Magazine by Greg Cwik

This is both a fitting tribute to an artist who rebuffed conventional painting techniques, and a disappointingly self-indulgent exercise, the efforts of a filmmaker whose affinity for abstractions often interfere with the story he’s trying to tell, and distract from the purported subject of the film.