Netflix’s Avedon gives Richard Avedon a film showcase

Netflix’s “Avedon,” a 1-hour-44-minute R-rated documentary directed by Ron Howard, turns Richard Avedon’s photographs and interviews into a career survey, NYT Arts said in a Nov. 13 review.

The review frames the film as an accessible entry point for Netflix audiences into an artist associated with 20th-century portraiture and fashion photography, extending beyond celebrity images to a 1979-to-1984 U.S. project on working people.

Alissa Wilkinson, the Times critic, wrote that the documentary solves a common problem for films about photographers: how to keep still images cinematic without reducing the work to a gallery of slides. Her assessment is that Howard’s film largely succeeds because the pictures carry the argument.

The documentary focuses on Avedon’s portraits, including images of Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol and Samuel Beckett, while also looking at his work for Harper’s Bazaar, Elle and Vogue, according to the review. Wilkinson wrote that Avedon’s images are so compelling that “you just want to keep looking.”

The film also places Avedon’s fashion and portrait work beside his photojournalism, including coverage of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and Berlin after the fall of the wall. That range gives the documentary a broader cultural frame than a conventional artist profile.

For Netflix, the film adds another artist biography to a documentary slate that often depends on archival material, interviews and access to existing work. The review’s main point is that “Avedon” benefits from the unusually strong visual record at its center rather than fighting against it.