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Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful

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Germany · 2020
1h 33m
Director Gero von Boehm
Starring Isabella Rossellini, Charlotte Rampling, Grace Jones, Anna Wintour
Genre Documentary

Women were clearly at the center of legendary photographer Helmut Newton's work. The stars of his iconic portraits– from Catherine Deneuve to Grace Jones, Charlotte Rampling to Isabella Rossellini – finally give their own interpretation of this controversial genius. Provocative, unconventional, subversive, his depiction of women still sparks the question: were they subjects or objects?

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What are critics saying?

63

RogerEbert.com by

For as incomplete as “The Bad and the Beautiful” feels in terms of addressing criticisms leveled at Newton, the inclusion of so many women’s perspectives is its own defensive statement.

70

The Hollywood Reporter by John DeFore

Never intending to rationalize away the seedier aspects of Newton's work, the film hopes instead to make us recognize the humor and inventiveness lurking there as well — and to persuade us that an artist's unruly erotic imagination doesn't necessarily tell us much about what he thinks of women.

83

Original-Cin by Karen Gordon

Would his work, or any work that walks the line the way his does, be tolerated today? It’s not explicitly in this documentary, but perhaps something worth asking after watching a film about an artist who experienced fascism first-hand.

70

Variety by Owen Gleiberman

An engaging and surprisingly playful documentary about the man who was arguably the most transgressive photographer to emerge from the 1960s and ’70s.

67

Austin Chronicle by Richard Whittaker

If von Boehm adds anything to what's known of Newton's life, it's to explore his iconography, about which he was very honest. His dismissiveness of photography as insightful, his enigmatic storytelling, and the great contradiction of his work, of how a young Jewish boy who was almost murdered during Kristallnacht absorbed so much of the imagery of the Reich's most artistic propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl.

75

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

It’s a fun, generally brisk biography, one whose tone might be the artist’s credo. Newton declared that there are “only two dirty words” in any of the three languages he spoke — “art” and “good taste.” He never let either limit what he was trying to say.

75

IndieWire by Ryan Lattanzio

While the film is hardly as transgressive as its subject, it manages to be unexpectedly moving, and a nostalgic time capsule of an art-world rebel whose unorthodox methods and decidedly politically incorrect vision couldn’t exist today.

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