GO SEE A GOOD MOVIE –
Dec. 2, 2022 – “It’s not a biodoc in any standard sense, thank God — Poitras, whose own career has revolved around the War on Terror, is much too ambitious a filmmaker to box herself into such an inherently stuffy format. ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’ is instead an incandescent work that examines Goldin’s personal life, her evolution as an artist, and her later turn toward harm-reduction advocacy, and understands them to be part of the same journey. At the film’s center is always Goldin’s determination to pull back the curtain of propriety and to show all the ugly, glorious truths behind it, whether with her childhood, with sexuality, with the stigma attached to sex work, with the AIDS crisis, or with the polite illusion that prescription drugs can’t destroy lives … If Goldin and Poitras seem like an odd pairing, the tension that comes from their collaboration is what gives ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’ its vitality.”
