If some of today’s Oscar nominated movie titles were unfamiliar to you, you are not alone. Fortunately, Tom Weyman, director of programming over at the Columbus Theatre, is on the job. The theater has been screening more movies lately, and he has several of these lesser-known titles in the pipeline. This weekend on Friday, (1/27) it’s “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” nominated for Best Documentary. On Saturday it’s “EO” nominated in the International Feature Film category.
We’ve been showing some great films at the Columbus – I highly recommend EO, a really beautiful and sweetly sad film. Both of these films have not played in Providence before this weekend, and are both Oscar nominated! Coming up, we will be screening Aftersun, To Leslie, No Bears, Infinity Pool, and bringing back some of our favorites from last year for encore screenings.
Tom isn’t the only one who loved “EO,” which tells the story of a donkey’s journey through modern Europe. The LA Times calls it “a rapturous hymn to the natural world from the 84-year-old Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski.” Also nominated:
“Aftersun” — Best Actor in a leading role. February 3rd.
“To Leslie” — Best Actress in a leading role. February 4th.
And now we can add Laura Poitras’s “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” to a growing film category devoted to the devastation wrought by the despicable Sackler family. First there was the HBO documentary, “The Crime of the Century,” directed by Alex Gibney; then came “Dopesick” a dramatization starring Michael Keaton.
We first wrote about the family in 2021 — that was after John Oliver covered them in 2019. Sad to say, the Sacklers are the Rhode Island family. They own Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, whose introduction is now viewed as the start of the opioid epidemic, which has killed more than 500,000 people nationwide and addicted millions more. At one time, Rhode Island was one of the world’s largest oxycodone manufacturers at a wholly-owned Purdue subsidiary, Rhodes Pharmaceuticals in Coventry. . . . still selling oxy.
Poitras has a unique take on this topic, one that involves photographer Nan Goldin who developed an addiction problem.
“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Laura Poitras’s intimate documentary about Goldin, her art and her activism, starts on March 10, 2018. That day, Goldin brought her fight against members of the Sackler family to the Met with a protest that turned its popular Temple of Dendur exhibition — an Egyptian temple installed in a gallery named the Sackler Wing — into a symbolic battlefield.
Poitras does not make boring movies.
The Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway, (directions)