All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

"A sublime and gritty knockout."

— Sheri Linden, Hollywood Reporter

"I can’t shake the feeling of being shook by it. I can’t wait to see it again."

— David Fear, Rolling Stone

"All the Beauty and the Bloodshed takes [the director's] work to new aesthetic heights and wrenching emotional depths."

— Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter

"All the Beauty and the Bloodshed remains, at heart, a simple and intimate profile of a woman who sees art and activism as one and the same."

— Ben Croll, TheWrap

"Bloodshed is structured into two intersplicing sections charging forward at a rate of devastation your tear ducts absolutely cannot keep up with."

— Luke Hicks, Paste Magazine

"It is extremely clever and deeply moving, and winningly gets at the essence of Goldin’s current and past work, without straining too hard to ape her style."

— Jordan Hoffman, The A.V. Club

"Already 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."

— Sophie Monks Kaufman, IndieWire

"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."

— Alison Willmore, New York Magazine (Vulture)

"Both complex and rawly immediate, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Laura Poitras’s film about the 69-year-old photographic artist and activist Nan Goldin, is a great documentary and maybe the most essential film of the year."

— Liam Lacey, Original-Cin

"One 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."

— Wendy Ide, Screen Daily

"Goldin might not have known it when she started photographing her LGBTQ friends, but her work has always been about looking at the so-called fringe cultures in society, about showing the problems that the masses would rather just ignore and making them so urgent that you can’t look away anymore."

— Lindsey Bahr, The Associated Press

"A great visual artist documentary has to be more than a series of images set to narration like an art history course. The best films find some compelling reason in the present to spend time with them. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed filmmaker Laura Poitras’ searing, urgent portrait of photographer Nan Goldin finds that in the opioid crisis."

— Tony Bravo, San Francisco Chronicle

"The movie’s bifurcated shape isn’t novel, but Poitras’s marshaling of all this information is exceptionally graceful. She has an abundance of fantastic material at her disposal — including a generous selection of Goldin’s artwork — but what makes the movie work so well is how Poitras seamlessly uses the different sections of Goldin’s life to weave a coherent portrait of the artist."

— Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

"If you’ve ever doubted how art, rage or action can make meaningful change, Goldin’s combination of all three fighting an opioid crisis that nearly killed her is exhilarating proof of the power of “screaming in the streets,” to borrow what the queer artist David Wojnarowicz — one of many close friends of Goldin’s whom the AIDS epidemic took — wryly described as a necessary ritual of the living in a time of too much death."

— Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times

"Nothing short of a true-life triumph, All The Beauty and the Bloodshed is all at once the most important film about addicts, outcasts, and what makes each one—no matter their "sin" or the stigma—family. There is an understanding at the core of this documentary, one that says to the addicts and the ostracized alike, 'I see you. I know you. I will not turn my back on you.' The message is welcomed; In fact, it sounds like a new hymn."

— Lex Briscuso, Slashfilm