Film

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Nan Goldin's fierce documentary self-portrait: a photographer who turned her camera on addiction, desire, and her own wounds, now channeling that unflinching eye toward the Sackler family and the opioid crisis. Urgent, gorgeous, and angry in ways that feel necessary.

TMDb rating3.6

If you liked this

The Social Dilemma2020

A documentarian's reckoning with a corporation's systemic harm, told through testimony and evidence. If you're energized by Goldin's accountability crusade, this targets a different monster with similar clarity.

But Ensemble cast of talking heads can feel scattered, and the stakes aren't as viscerally personal as Goldin's story.

The Social Dilemma poster

Hoop Dreams1994

A filmmaker follows lives across decades, capturing systemic exploitation beneath surface glamour. Like Goldin, it refuses to look away from bodies and systems that grind people up.

But Long (three hours), and its basketball focus might feel distant if you're looking for something more immediately urgent.

Hoop Dreams poster

The Act of Killing2012

A documentary that turns the camera on perpetrators of atrocity and forces accountability through confrontation. The same moral insistence as Goldin, but in a different register entirely.

But Extraordinarily difficult to watch. Not an evening film—it's an ordeal, and it means to be.

The Act of Killing poster

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Sans Soleil1983

Both artists use their medium to think through memory and mortality. Where Goldin builds identity through cumulative testimony, Marker dissolves it into poetry. Both refuse false clarity.

Marker's essayistic documentary collage: memory, image, and loss as a meditation rather than narrative. The form itself is the argument—fragments that refuse to cohere, like consciousness, like trauma.

But Experimental and oblique. It demands more than Goldin does; it won't give you answers, only better questions. Some will find it impenetrable.

Sans Soleil poster
More like this (7)

Grey Gardens1976

The Maysles brothers film two women in decay and isolation with radical empathy and no sentimentality. Like Goldin, it finds beauty in wreckage without flinching from the damage.

But Slow cinema from the '70s. If you want momentum and moral clarity, this meanders into ambiguity.

Grey Gardens poster

The Janes2022

Women organizing against a rigged system, telling their own stories with urgency and intimacy. A parallel activist documentary made in the same moment, with similar texture and rage.

But Focused on a specific historical moment in Chicago. If you want something with broader reach, this is narrower.

The Janes poster

Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist1997

A portrait of an artist who weaponized his own pain into art and activism. Same unflinching honesty about the body, same refusal to look away from what hurts.

But Extremely graphic. Not voyeuristic, but uncompromising in ways that aren't for everyone.

Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist poster

Blackfish2013

A documentary that builds an irrefutable case against a corporation's cruelty through narrative momentum and evidence. It has Goldin's moral architecture: here's what happened, here's who's responsible.

But By now it feels a bit dated, and the villain is more obviously villainous than Sackler's corporate abstraction.

Blackfish poster

The Last Breath2014

A grandfather's final days filmed by his grandson with intimacy and no distance. Different subject, but the same permission to sit with mortality and love without sentimentality.

But Quieter and more intimate than Goldin's fury. If you want activism and rage, this is contemplation.

Tickled2016

A documentary that starts as a curiosity and becomes an investigation into coercion and exploitation. It has the same detective's eye for systems beneath surfaces.

But The subject matter becomes genuinely unsettling. And it pivots into true-crime territory that some find exploitative.

Tickled poster

Cocksucker Blues1972

Both emerge from photographers' eyes obsessed with capturing what institutions want hidden. Both privilege access and intimacy over respectability. Both are weapons against the glossed version of truth.

Robert Frank's banned Rolling Stones documentary: unfiltered, intimate, and radically unauthorized. Contraband cinema that captures permission-less realness—celebrities without the filter that usually contains them.

But Famously obscure for good reasons. Low-fi, chaotic, hard to find, and not everyone will understand what they're watching. It's archival and raw, not polished.

Cocksucker Blues poster

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