Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
The life of internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin is told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis.
Laura Poitras's documentary is a formally inventive and emotionally devastating work that interweaves Nan Goldin's singular photographic legacy with the urgent, present-tense campaign against the Sackler family and the opioid crisis. The structural intercutting between Goldin's personal history—her sister's institutionalization and death, the AIDS crisis, her own addiction—and the P.A.I.N. activist protests creates a genuinely unusual documentary architecture. Goldin's photography is itself cinematically rich, and Poitras treats it with great compositional intelligence, making the film visually exceptional for the documentary form. The approach is highly distinctive—few docs so seamlessly merge portrait-of-an-artist with activist chronicle with personal trauma memoir. The ending is emotionally resonant but slightly unresolved, reflecting real-world ongoing struggle rather than dramatic closure, which is honest but somewhat diffuse. Acting is not a primary category for a documentary, rated modestly for the subjects' candor and presence in interview footage.