91
Metascore
34 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100IndieWireSophie Monks KaufmanIndieWireSophie Monks KaufmanAlready a robust director, Laura Poitras has leveled up with a towering and devastating work of shocking intelligence and still greater emotional power... This is an overwhelming film.
- 100Rolling StoneDavid FearRolling StoneDavid FearIt entered the festival circuit as a politically charged take on the standard there-goeth-the-great-artist story and exited it as a peerless act of personal reclamation. I can’t shake the feeling of being shook by it.
- 91The PlaylistRafaela Sales RossThe PlaylistRafaela Sales RossHaving these two storylines run parallel provides for both disconnect and whiplash, a narrative choice that emphasizes what Goldin beautifully labels “the darkness of the soul” — to be plagued to feel everything while concurrently condemned to nihilistic numbness.
- 90The Hollywood ReporterSheri LindenThe Hollywood ReporterSheri LindenAll the Beauty and the Bloodshed takes [the director's] work to new aesthetic heights and wrenching emotional depths.
- 90Screen DailyWendy IdeScreen DailyWendy IdeOne of the more satisfying and provocative artist portraits of recent years. Poitras’ film combines the richly sketched sense of a broader cultural landscape of Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground, with the angular candour seen in Marina Abramovich: The Artist Is Present.
- 90VarietyOwen GleibermanVarietyOwen GleibermanWhat’s profound, and incendiary, about “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” is the way that Laura Poitras excavates the story of how deeply Nan Goldin’s photographs are rooted in trauma.
- 83The Film StageDavid KatzThe Film StageDavid KatzIt’s important to note how successfully and stylishly Poitras and [her editing team] cross-cut between exposition and narration on Goldin’s long, fascinating biography and present-day passages where more information on her various campaigning efforts against the Sacklers comes through.
- 80CineVueJohn BleasdaleCineVueJohn BleasdaleGoldin’s career and Poitras’ latest asserts the primacy of the artist as a participant in the world. Something which will make us see the world differently starting from the very walls from which the art might hang: the rooms in which the films are seen.
- 75Slant MagazineKenji FujishimaSlant MagazineKenji FujishimaThe warm, rueful, and sometimes angry All the Beauty and the Bloodshed accomplishes the goal of any documentary worthy of its genre by shining an insightful light onto what informs an artist’s vision.