‘All The Beauty And The Bloodshed’ Review: Laura Poitras’ Portrait of Nan Goldin is a Powerful Rumination On Grief [Venice]

Jodi Benson is praising Halle Bailey.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Debbie Allen and Amber Riley are moving into “The Lower Bottoms.” The two actors join the scripted dark comedy podcast — about denizens in a gentrifying neighborhood in West Oakland, Calif. — for Season 2. Also appearing in the second season of “The Lower Bottoms” is Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker, who will guest star alongside returning stars including Kelsey Grammer, Theo Rossi and Annie Ilonzeh. The show is coproduced by iHeartMedia and Will Packer Media. Season 2’s first episode premieres Monday (Sept. 12) with new episodes released every Monday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other audio platforms. The second season will have a 10-episode run, the same as the first season, which was released in the summer of 2021.

For critics and audiences alike, the Venice Film Festival is an important first look at the films that will shape the award season and year-end conversations. That puts added emphasis on the Venice Film Festival awards – including the Golden Lion, the festival’s top prize – as the first step towards canon-building for the rest of the year.

Guy Lodge Film Critic If you found yourself wide awake in the wee small hours with personal demons rattling in your brain, and you picked up the phone to share them with a patient, neutral stranger, Tessa Thompson’s measured, calming voice is more or less exactly what you’d hope to hear on the other end of the line. As Beth, a night-shift volunteer for a crisis helpline, the actor’s naturally gentle, benevolent presence is the chief asset of Steve Buscemi’s minor-key chamber drama “The Listener” — not that she has a host of elements to compete with in what amounts, on screen at least, to a one-woman show.  Thompson’s unforced credibility isn’t shared, however, by a flat, superficial script that treats an assortment of mental health ailments as quirky conversation fuel. Each anguished call that Beth takes, over the course of one long, dark night of assorted souls, is written less like a recognizable human exchange than as an actor’s heightened audition piece, and played out as such by a voice-only ensemble stacked with distractingly recognizable names. Though the global pandemic is only incidentally mentioned, “The Listener” plays in all aspects like a project conceived in the most self-searching and self-indulgent depths of the isolation era. It’s hard to imagine audiences wanting to enter that headspace now.

HBO Documentary Films has acquired U.S. television and streaming rights to Oscar winner Laura Poitras’s film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, fresh from its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and sneak preview at Telluride.

A Greater Manchester Police officer who tried to rape a woman in a 'deplorable' violent sex attack will have his sentence reviewed by the Court of Appeal.

Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer At this point, complaining about Disney’s deathless drive to cannibalize its entire library of animated classics into live-action remakes can feel as futile as complaining about capitalism itself. The studio has immense IP resources to exploit, a hungry well of content to fill, and a commercial imperative to introduce new generations of kids to the characters they’ll soon be expected to recognize on merch and in theme parks. And in truth, the studio could be doing a lot worse with these trawls through the archives. Once in a while genuine inspiration strikes (as it did with the gothy, revisionist “Maleficent,” or Jon Favreau’s visually inventive “The Jungle Book”), and even the least-fortunate of these remakes have mostly just been forgettable.

A powerful meditation on recent history, In Viaggio premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. Directed by previous Golden Lion winner Gianfranco Rosi, it follows the travels of Pope Francis, using mostly archival footage to paint not just a picture of the man, but of the modern world.

The cherry blossoms are blooming which means that The Real Housewives of Potomac are coming back to television. Bravo has confirmed that Season 7 of the franchise will premiere on October 9 at 8 p.m. ET with a 75-minute supersized episode.

After a lifetime spent creating outrage and offence, both on and off screen, Korean master Kim Ki-duk has left the world with this final film, finished by his friends after his death. The story of a passionate affair that curdles almost immediately into jealousy and hate – but ends on a lyrically wistful note – is a startlingly appropriate rogue’s epitaph.

The scourge of the opioid crisis has been documented in the press and in government reports; the culpability of the Sacklers, the multi-billionaire pharmaceutical family whose former company Purdue made the painkiller Oxycontin, has been successfully dramatized. The Sacklers are everywhere in Laura Poitras’ gripping documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, but they are supporting players.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” the photographer Nan Goldin tells a woeful, revealing, and in its way rather funny anecdote about how in the 1980s, when she first gathered up her photographs — casually transgressive images of her and her friends, who were often drag queens and addicts, along with shots of the assorted other people and situations she experienced as part of the hummingly squalid East Village New York subculture — and tried to shop them around to galleries and museums, they were roundly rejected, because the arbiters of taste, who were inevitably men, favored photographs that were black-and-white and composed in elegant meticulous ways. Goldin’s photographs were in garish verité color, set in environments that were so scruffy (messy bohemian apartments, ordinary people just lolling around) that it looked, to the gallery mavens, like there was no visual organization to them, no art.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Six decades into a career of over 40 films, the last thing you might request of a new feature from 92-year-old documentarian Frederick Wiseman is that it surprise us. Yet after a run of expansive, richly process-oriented observations of mostly American institutions and communities, his new film, “A Couple,” upends expectations of his work in what feels an almost mirthfully perverse number of ways. For starters, it’s laser-focused on just one person, not a heaving collective of human labor and activity. It’s short — very much so, in fact, barely stretching past an hour. Also, lest we be burying the lede, it’s not a documentary. Wiseman’s first ever narrative feature sees him collaborating with French actor-writer Nathalie Boutefeu on a biopic of sorts: a portrait of Leo Tolstoy’s anguished wife Sophia, dramatizing her marital dissatisfaction and psychic pain with with a lyrical, literate ear.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic “The lessons of the fire, as we reach for something higher,” a voice wails as images of flying crows and blood dripping down a rose’s thorny stem flood the screen. “With eyes we’ve all come to know, he’s the devil in Ohio.”  This theme song has a self-conscious ludicrousness that’s ultimately earned by the series it introduces — at least in one sense. Netflix’s “Devil in Ohio” isn’t so great that its missteps end up making sense, but it’s so schlockily unembarrassed by its excesses and its shortcomings alike that it feels difficult to critique.  Here, Emily Deschanel plays Suzanne, a psychiatrist whose particularly challenging new patient Mae (Madeleine Arthur) seems in urgent need of shelter after escaping a cult. Naturally, Suzanne brings her home — and, of course, Suzanne has three daughters (played by Xaria Dotson, Alisha Newton, and Naomi Tan) from whom Mae can be acclimated into high-school life, or on whom Mae can rapidly exert her influence.

Caroline Framke Chief TV Critic For any adult still avoiding animation out of some stubborn refusal to understand its advantages as a both visual and storytelling medium, “Pantheon” makes its ambitions known from the get-go. After the eerie opening theme, scoring a fluorescent string of code smashing through a Greek statue, the show cuts to a high-school classroom, where a blunt voiceover lays the stakes bare. “Most of the girls in my class completely missed the moment when the world began to end,” teen outcast Maddie Kim (Katie Chang) tells us, the laptops blinking in unison as if in agreement. It’s a fittingly arresting start to this unnerving series, which taps an all-star cast to meld micro character work with macro questions about technology that may never have a satisfying answer.

Thania Garcia Live Nation Women is joining forces with the When All Women Vote campaign to put together a week of events called Beautiful Noise Live, taking place in Atlanta from Sept. 19-23. Fans can register ahead of time for a chance to win a variety of prizes including VIP experiences for the Brandi Carlile concert on Sept. 22 at the Fox Theater and the Alicia Keys concert Sept. 23 at Cadence Bank Amphitheater. The VIP experiences are a part of the grand prize package which also includes a trip for one winner and a friend to attend Beautiful Noise Live in Atlanta. This package covers the price of airfare, hotel stay and tickets. There is also a silver prize package comprised of a gift bag with special edition merch, along with a pair of tickets to either Carlile’s or Keys’ concerts. The last day to enter to win is Sept. 13.

Right at the beginning of The March On Rome, a special screening in the Venice Days section of the Venice Film Festival, Mark Cousins draws our collective gaze to a piece of graffiti saying that cinema is most powerful weapon of all. It isn’t clear — to me, anyway — whether that joyful proclamation dates back to 1922, when Benito Mussolini led a Fascist march from Naples to Rome, or to some other eruption of historical optimism. Cinema isn’t as powerful as all that — if it were, Fascism would have been clobbered to a pulp by Chaplin, Lubitsch and all the other filmmakers who lampooned its vainglorious leaders. But images do matter. They certainly mattered to Italian Fascism.

Addie Morfoot Contributor Laura Poitras’ “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Steve James’ “A Compassionate Spy” and Evgeny Afineevsky’s “Freedom on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom” are among 11 documentaries making their world premieres at the Venice Film Festival this year, with Poitras’ competition title vying for a Golden Lion — a rare feat for a doc at a major international film festival. The growing number of high-profile non-fiction films in and out of competition at Venice suggests that major European film festivals have finally accepted documentaries as viable, cinematic art.While docs at the Toronto International Film Festival and major U.S. fests, including Sundance, Telluride and South by Southwest, have long been the belles of the ball, the most prominent international festivals, including Venice, Cannes and Berlin, have been slow to embrace non-fiction content, especially in competition.  

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer SPOILER ALERT: The final question in this interview includes a spoiler for the Season 3 finale of “The Boys.” “I love Boimler,” says “Star Trek: Lower Decks” star Jack Quaid of his adorably hapless character Brad Boimler. “I love him so much.” Quaid’s third season voicing the Starfleet ensign launched on Paramount+ on Thursday, but as Quaid and co-star Tawny Newsome (who voices Ens. Beckett Mariner) announced at San Diego Comic-Con in July, both actors will get to play the roles in live-action for the first time in a Season 2 episode of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” in 2023. The actor explained to Variety how the episode was possible, why he’s proud of Boimler in Season 3 of “Lower Decks,” how his character on “The Boys” will react to the big reveal in the Season 3 finale and what he did for the cast of “The Boys” spinoff series “Gen V.”