Laura Poitras’ Nan Goldin Doc “All The Beauty And The Bloodshed” Reviews Box Office – Specialty Preview

Laura Poitras’ winner of the Venice Golden Lion All the beauty and the bloodshed opens today in three theaters and tests a busy specialty market at the IFC Center, Lincoln Center & BAM in NYC. It will add LA and San Francisco (AMC Sunset 5 and AMC Kabuki) on December 2.

Presented by Neon, this is the story of internationally acclaimed photographer and activist Nan Goldin, told through her slideshows, intimate interviews and ground-breaking photographs, as she intertwines with the artist’s struggle, the billionaire Sackler family and her company Purdue Pharma, makers of notoriously addictive pain to control drug Oxycontin, responsible for the nation’s devastating opioid crisis. It was only the second time that a doctor in Venice received the highest award. The film was shown in Telluride, Toronto and at the New York Film Festival (Centerpiece Film).

Poitras and Goldin will be doing questions and answers at the theater throughout the weekend. Appointment overview here. It is certified 96% fresh with critics on Rotten Tomatoes. It begins in a documentary boom.

Goldin and a group of artists and activists founded the anti-big pharma group PAIN ((Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) in 2017, with the Sacklers’ “toxic philanthropy” as their first target. Goldin, himself a recovering addict, has ‘ fought for institutions that accepted the family’s money and sparked protests from the Guggenheim lobby to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Smithsonian.

Poitras’ first full-length document, my country my countryabout Iraqis living under American occupation was nominated for an Oscar. citizen fourabout government whistleblower Edward Snowden, won the 2015 Oscar for best documentary.

Also open today Leonor will never die which won this year’s Special Jury Prize for Innovative Spirit at Sundance after being in the festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition. Presented by Music Box Films, written and directed by Martika Ramirez Escobar. Starring Sheila Francisco as Leonor Reyes, once a major player in the Philippine action film industry who is now struggling to pay the bills. Leonor reads an ad looking for screenplays and begins tinkering with an unfinished screenplay and chasing her wildest dreams.

It will open at the Metrograph in NYC and expand on December 2nd.

“We wish, like everyone else, that the specialty market as a whole was stronger, but see isolated areas of success and just try to see where there is room on the calendar for unconventional and unusual films,” says Music Box Cinema Director of Distribution Kyle Westphal.

The Metrograph attracts “a number of younger film lovers,” he said, and that’s the hope Leonor — which has also played TIFF as part of Midnight Madness, a handful of Asian-American festivals and Fantastic Fest — will attract a range of fans from all genres. Westphal called it “a spiritual, imaginative and tightly constructed film. A picture of someone caught between life and death [having] Resonance with art films and slow films, but [also] an action movie.”

There’s a fair amount of arthouse fare floating around like festival fare and Oscar-winning films piling up in theaters. On holiday this week, Steven Spielberg The Fables expanded by Universal Pictures (to 638 locations) and bones and such Wednesday went wide (to 2,722 places).

Westphal isn’t the only one improving the adult/specialist/art house market, but it’s still unbalanced. Some blame theater maintenance, i.e. the moviegoing experience, but various factors play a role, while others point to the complexity of marketing specialty films to fragmented audiences, the closing of major theaters and more art houses blocking screens for wide studio releases.