10. “All That’s Beautiful and Bleeding” (Laura Poitras)
Poitras’ tough, formally elegant portrait of photographer Nan Goldin, her art, and her activism opens with Goldin huddling with some like-minded fellow citizens outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not long after, Goldin and others held a death event inside the facility, one of many protests by her and others against the agency taking money from members of the Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma developed the opioid pain reliever. The drug OxyContin. As Poitras continues to demonstrate, Goldin’s protests are just the latest chapter for an artist who draws beauty from bloodshed. (In the theater.)
And make sure to watch: “Doomsday”; “Cathedral”; “Boutonniere”; “Descendants”; “Dos Estaciones; “Funny Pages”; ; “Three Minutes: Extended”; “Tsugua’s Diary”; “Until”; “The Queen”; and “The Worst Man in the World.”
Scott
best question asked by a movie
Flipping through my memories of 2022, I find a lot of interesting movies and a lot of anxious, conflicted opinions about the state of cinema. Much of it has to do with one question: Will people venture back to theaters post-pandemic, or is streaming the future? The success of Top Gun: Maverick in May and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in November didn’t quite solve that problem.
Neither has the proliferation of movies that evoke the wonder and glory of cinema’s past. Nostalgic movies have become a genre in their own right. Last year’s tender celluloid elegy “Belfast” and “Hand of God” are followed by this year’s “The Fabermans,” Steven Spielberg’s reflections on his movie-obsessed youth ; Sam Mendes’ “Empire of Light,” set in a fading seaside cinema in England in the early 1980s; and “Babylon,” Damien Chazelle (Damien Chazelle) A wild dream of old Hollywood.
Sentimentality and self-consciousness can be signs of decadence. Set out to honor the glory of an embattled art form, and you might end up contributing to its obituary. Not that I think movies are dying, as they have been for the past 90 years, because they are mortally threatened by sound, television, corporate greed, and audience vulgarism. Movies are always becoming something else, even as they drag their own histories. Old styles juxtaposed with new possibilities, originality finding a way to prove itself in the howling wilderness of the franchise’s thundering integrations and algorithms.