Goya's Ghosts

Starring: Natalie Portman, Javier Bardem

Release: 2006

From Andrei Rublev, audiences do not really get a coherent and accurate biography of the life of Russia"s most famous painter of icons, but, what they do get is a fairly honest sense of the nature and quality of life Medieval Russia and how that experience is reflected in orthodox art of the period. In Lust of Life, viewers of the film can glean a fairly accurate understanding of the circumstances surrounding and the overall arc of the life of Van Gogh, as long as they don"t get to hung up on the details.Goya"s Ghosts, meanwhile, deals with a plot and story that are complete contrivance -- a made up tale and a good a sordid story. Like the previous two films discussed in this list, the film assumes the premise that the artist, in this case Spain"s Francisco Goya, captures in his unique style the zeitgeist of his era.His surroundings and environment directly influence his work.Yet, Goya"s Ghosts is decidedly more concerned with the year it was released (2005) than it is with 1797, the year in which it is set.

Lust for Life

Starring: Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn

Release: 1956

Lust for Life stars Kirk Douglas and presents the career of Vincent van Gogh, including the influence of his friendships with painters Camille Pissarro, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Paul Gauguin (a part which won Anthony Quinn an Oscar). Although melodramatic at times, the film presents a surprisingly honest portrayal of the artist's life – his live-in relationship with a prostitute, his mental illness, and his suicide are all represented in a fullness that you might not expect from a movie released in 1956.

Sitting to watch this movie, I figured there wouldn't be anything further from the last movie on the list. After all, Andrei Rublev is a fairly inaccessible Soviet era Russian art film, while Lust for Life is a lavish Hollywood biopic. And on first viewing, my expectations were met. Where Andrei Rublev relished its artist's subject more than it celebrated his work and pushed the painter to the sidelines of his own namesake film, Lust for Life savors van Gogh's larger-than-life status. When young van Gogh argues with his instructors in the opening scenes, insisting that he passionately wants nothing more than to become a minister, the movie feels almost too self-aware – it knows that the audience already knows where this story is going and that young Vincent will fail in religious life.

Andrei Rublev

Starring: Anatoly Solonitsyn, Ivan Lapikov

Release: 1971

The first film on the list (which is not ranked; these artist portraits are presented in no particular order) is Andrei Rublev (1966), about the medieval icon portrait painter and Russian Orthodox saint of the same name. Little is known about Rublev, who died in the early 15th century, so the film's director, Andrei Tarkovsky, took the slim facts and expanded from there. Initially the film's religious and political content led the Soviet government to squash its release, but over the next seven years, cut versions made their way to the Cannes Film Festival and throughout the Soviet Union. It was many years before the film was available in its totality – and quite a totality it is, at about three and a half hours long.

My husband studied Andrei Rublev back in college, and I was wary when, before we watched the movie, he announced, "I'm going to warn you – it's a little…tangential. And long." Obviously, a warning like that is unsettling and cryptic to say the least, but it's actually pretty on target.

So my husband and I finally got around to seeing Angels and Demons this week. We'd been a little hesitant to rent it; my husband, a film student, hadn't liked The Da Vinci Code as a movie, and I wasn't crazy about the bad art history it had presented. I had enjoyed the book well enough, though, so I decided we should give it a shot. At the movie's end, we were both fairly unimpressed, but it did prompt some interesting questions.

First of all, which is a better movie about art? On the one hand, The Da Vinci Code should be applauded for showing the actual works on screen. While the real Mona Lisa wasn't shown (the Louvre unsurprisingly wouldn't allow for such bright lights to be shone directly onto the painted canvas), the other works that the characters encounter in the museum are the actual masterpieces, bringing high-quality footage of the pieces to people who might otherwise never see them.

Night photography with a digital camera can be a very difficult but rewarding. During the holiday season, when days get shorter, we often want to capture photographs of outdoor moments, such as Christmas caroling or our home light displays. However, these desires are often frustrated when all our digital cameras capture is blackness or unintelligible blurs. Depending on the type of camera you own, there are different ways to approach the problem.

Some simple consumer grade cameras come with a preset night mode, but the resulting pictures are oftentimes blurry with streaky color. This effect can be good if you want to pretend to take pictures of ghost or enter an art contest for high schoolers, but it’s less than thrilling for those of us who want to capture an actual moment. An easy solution is to invest in a tripod or monopod, or simply rest the camera on a surface more stable than your hand. A flat, steady surface is a necessity for quality night photography taken on a simple digital camera.