Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Blistering performances.

I will come quickly to the point: this is the best movie ever made about an artist. It is miraculous and in a category of its own.It is long and slow, but it is also true and intense.No one who cares about the artistic process could possibly go wrong watching this epic masterpiece!

Following a rough chronology from 1884 to 1894, when Norwegian artist Edvard Munch began expressionism and established himself as northern Europe's most maligned and controversial artist, the film also flashes back to the death from consumption of his mother, when he was five, his sister's death, and his near death at 13 from pulmonary disease.This film is amazing. Not many artists get a thorough biopic, but here Munch is given one in detail and at almost three hours in length. Of all artists, he seems an unlikely choice. Yes, he is known, but not as well known as some of the other artists mentioned in the film (such as van Gogh). For most, he is probably only really associated with "The Scream".Here we get a great biography, a deeper look at art history, but also get a nice look at European history, with Germany and Russia ever in the background, though never a key part of the film.

The color and composition of the film -- with its grays, asymmetries, elongated figures -- seem to be modeled on Picasso's blue period rather than on Edward Munch's own work. But Picasso goes oddly unmentioned, perhaps because an allusion to Picasso might somehow qualify Munch's own artistic radicalism. This investigation of the painter as creative genius who destroys himself with drink and tobacco in an urban garret deploys all the familiar stereotypes about originality, over and over again. The director presents Munch as haunted by the image of the death by consumption of his sister and by his only partially fulfilled sexual desires. The film is beautifully self-indulgent and rather too long.

Probably the most powerful biography of a painter on film with Tarkovski's "Andrei Rublev" and Pialat's "Van Gogh". The way Watkins handles the narration of his film and of Munch's life and art is simply amazing. A perfect example of life as art and art as life. The commentary is never redundant with what is seen on the screen and like the works of Munch, the shape of the movie is like a spiral, where scenes come back over and over, in a repetitive manner, like the paintings/carvings of Munch, who often drew the same subjects. It makes you want to see more of Munch's works as well as other movies by Watkins. Definitely worth being seen more than once.