Popular reviews

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  Review by Hari Nef 2

  life-affirming as in "life goes on." more than a document or a portrait, this film is a guidebook on how a certain kind of person should live. "a certain kind of person"...goldin is the mold, she broke it–whatever. goldin made art out of her life decades before the internet disciplined a generation to make product out of ours. goldin wore her traumas like so many buttons and badges before it was fashionable, or terribly profitable. she ratified–ratifies–the beauty of transsexuals, junkies, whores, fags, and dykes because she saw it–sees it–not because she thought it or thinks it. we know this song: one moves to new york, renames herself, puts some funky chemicals in her body, chooses a new family, starts…

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★ 1

  The political act of making private life and pain into a public, visual work of persuasion and rebellion as documented in the life of legendary photographer Nan Goldin, whose own life experience as an addict and queer feminist outsider artist has given her a front-row seat to beautiful, defiant people from all walks of life in deliberately horrible, destitute circumstances that the powerful have yet to answer for. Obviously you go into something like this hoping to see a wonderful old woman look into the camera and say “when we eventually abolish the prison system the Sackler family should be the last ones out” (and the documentation in here of the activism itself appropriately alternates between cathartic and gut-wrenching), but there’s…

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  Review by David Sims ★★★★½ 1

  a great movie about bearing witness

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  Review by Abby ★★★★ 4

  “She sees the future and all the beauty and the bloodshed” 

  Mic drop best “movie title in a movie” moment of 2022.

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  Review by fran hoepfner ★★★★½ 1

  started crying at the film’s introduction of David Wojnarowicz and then just never stopped basically

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  Review by Sean Fennessey ★★★★½ 1

  The rare occasion in which the words “brave” and “fearless” are appropriate on this site.

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  Review by Brian Formo ★★★★½ 4

  Anyone who says this lacks focus because it should've been about Nan Goldin's artwork or her activism vs the Sacklers in the art world doesn't understand the through line. And the through line is something that Covid shattered for many people. That is a sense of community. Her artwork captures her community of artists and counterculture misfits of queers, punks, and sex workers. Her activism captures her new community of organizers against opiods and blind greed. It is a beautiful shift. And its something I've personally been struggling with—not opiods—but this looking back at the community I'd been in in my youth through the local music scene and the beautiful and rambunctious artists that moved through it. Then my community…

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  Review by CinemaJoe ★★★★½ 4

  Art and activism. Powerful on their own, cataclysmic when bonded.

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  Review by Sophy

  I cried for two hours straight: for how inspiring she is as a complex and whole human being, for the transcendent moments of activism, for the beauty of her art, for the pain that she's experienced, for her sister, for all the beautiful lives lost to senseless greed and stigma, for the bereaved parents, for the many victims, beauty beauty beauty, blood.

  For the people I've lost. For the things we can't talk about but should.

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★★½

  This does a stellar job of interweaving multiple stories — it’s both a Nan Goldin origin and a present day activism procedural — and of telling both in a way that honors and illuminates the style and philosophy of its subject. It all plays seamlessly, but that must have been so incredibly difficult to pull off.

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  Review by jourdain searles ★★★★★

  absolutely essential.

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  Review by Ella Kemp ★★★★½

  None of this will be erased. You can’t refuse to believe something that’s impossible to ignore. What’s private and wrong will come to light. In these photos survives a search for what’s right and what’s true, and a celebration of what those above us tried to destroy. Our bodies are so fragile. These fatally dependent lovers will live forever.