Hockney

Hockney is a little work of art of its own, even if it's so very nice and happy about everything.

“Everyone is looking all the time; you just have to train yourself to look harder,” Hockney explains. This warm, affectionate, perceptive film makes looking harder look easy.

This is a sunny, admiring documentary about the British (and Los Angeles) treasure David Hockney, who remains productive at 78, is candid and entertaining in interview segments and seems utterly content and grateful for the life he’s had and the artistry he’s been gifted with.

An officially sanctioned but pleasingly gush-free cinematic monograph.

When it deepens its intellectual focus, Hockney begins to lose coherence, with rushed sequences that cover his stage designs, his landscapes and his experiments with photography.

It’s an engaging and garrulous film, and Hockney is now a cheerful, grandfatherly figure, and an object lesson in taking the boy out of Bradford, and not the other way around.

After a nearly virtuoso opening, it reduces passages of the painter's life into multiple montages of pop pabulum.