Metacritic reviews

There’s much more to Oeke Hoogendijk’s My Rembrandt than initially meets the eye. Taking a close, curatorial look, not at the life, times and oeuvre of the great painter himself, but of contemporary relationships with his work, her latest documentary explores, to great effect, the motives for possession, obsession and ongoing fascination with the Dutch Old Master.

It features an awful lot of very rich, clever, cordially self-satisfied collectors and connoisseurs; their pink, twinkly-eyed faces positively beam out of the screen, and surely Hoogendijk is inviting us to wonder how Rembrandt himself would have painted them.

This is among the most enjoyable art-docs of the last couple of years.

Hoogendijk also has a keen eye for drama, and My Rembrandt is dotted with anecdotes that snowball into lively art-world clashes of ego.

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 — “my.”

My Rembrandt is at its most interesting when struggling to reconcile the slow, careful work of art restoration with the crass, instant gratification on acquiring such rarefied objects.

While My Rembrandt poses heady questions about the difference between acquisitiveness and appreciation, it mostly plays like a straight art-world documentary that itself would have benefited from a more vertiginous, obsessive approach.