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All the Beauty and the Bloodshed Movie Review

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a 2022 documentary film directed by Laura Poitras. It is one of the best documentaries of the year.

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“Photography is like a flash of euphoria“

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Rare footage and intimate interviews provide insight into the life and work of renowned photographer and activist Nan Goldin. This is the most overstuffed documentary this year as it deals with three distinctly different subjects throughout its two-hour runtime. The result is a film that isn’t as cogent as should have been. The editing is as good as you can expect for this type of incoherent approach, but the structure remained hazy.

The least engaging part of the movie is its most important one, which led to its activist and urgent third act that to me was less interesting than the rest of the picture. Depicting the opioid epidemic in the United States and how Goldin went against the Sackler family, this section is very American-centric and not as important to viewers like me who don’t live in the country. I didn’t know anything about this beforehand and the movie did familiarize me with this issue well, but overall it failed to engage me with it.

The second theme is the personal story of Nan Goldin herself. Tracking her childhood all the way to adulthood, this is the more intimate and interesting section that was particularly effective when focusing on her sex work days. Destigmatizing this profession while still showcasing the many negative aspects constituted this rare honest take on a subject that is often tackled in a more sensational manner.

But the best and most intriguing part of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed has to be the insight at the LGBT subculture in America. Goldin is bisexual herself, so she had numerous interactions with members of this community. Many of these moments are captured through her photography work beautifully. Her take on this community is an honest one as she makes an argument that despite the extensive mistreatment of LGBT people in the past, it must have been more exciting and colorful being in this subculture back when it wasn’t accepted than it is now.

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Laura Poitras directed the movie so well and the editing is as good as the structure could offer it. Witnessing all these amazing historic photographs was wonderful as they told a story all on their own. They were beautifully cross-cut with the interviews and the footage from the era, making the documentary feel very much as if you are stepping into history yourself. I just wish that they chose just one of these subjects and it would have been much more streamlined.