Helmut Newton: The Bad And The Beautiful

When photographer Helmut Newton died at 83 after crashing his car outside the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles in 2004, he left behind a corpus of work that was singular—and singularly controversial. His extraordinary images of statuesque and often nude supermodels were both derided as misogynist and hailed as empowering to women. A notorious bad boy who was famous for his dislike of ‘art’, Newton revelled in the controversy that his images engendered and, as they say, smiled all the way to the bank. Director Gero von Boehm has made an energetic and thoroughly engaging portrait of this legendary provocateur, and the results are more than a little bit surprising…

‘A fascinating read on the career of an artist whose always-controversial work may look even more problematic to youngsters encountering it here for the first time, Gero von Boehm's Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful both delights in its hero's troublemaking side and urges viewers to look beyond his pictures' surface sexual politics… [T]he doc offers a warm and approachable take on Newton's cold, aggressive aesthetic. It's one of those rare docs that might change minds about its subject's merits…’—John DeFore, Hollywood Reporter