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    From - BBC World News By - Nicholas Barber Edit by - Amal Udawatta (Image credit: The Kinkade Family Foundation) Beloved by many, despised by others, Thomas Kinkade's quaint rustic scenes and his wholesome image belied a dark and tortured story that contrasts with his 'sugary' artworks. Thomas Kinkade was one of the best-selling artists in history, as well as one of the most divisive. When he died in 2012, the American painter had been rocked by business problems, but at his commercial peak a decade earlier, his company was bringing in more than  $100m a year . And yet his work was despised by many critics – not because it was blasphemous or obscene, but because, well, he specialised in quaint pictures of thatched-roof rural cottages nestling in leafy groves. "Thomas Kinkade's style is illustrative saccharine fantasy rather than art with which you can connect at any meaningful level," Charlotte Mullins, the author of A Little History of Art, tells the BBC....

    Nicholas Barber Brook Rushton From Superman to I Know What You Did Last Summer – these are the films to watch at the cinema and stream at home this month. A24 Eddington Best known as the horror auteur who chilled audiences with Hereditary and  Midsommar , Ari Aster moves on to state-of-the-nation satirical comedy with his latest film, Eddington. The title is the name of a small desert town in New Mexico where the sheriff, Joaquin Phoenix, is at loggerheads with the business-minded mayor, Pedro Pascal. Their feud has something to do with the sheriff's wife, Emma Stone, but it spirals out of control in 2020 when the town is hit by the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests. Aster "transforms everyday American insanity into one of the most artistically complete and compulsively watchable doom-scrolls of the year",  says Tomris Laffly in Elle . "It's insightful, gloriously bonkers, and often very funny… both the definitive Covid movie and a modern-day ...