Great Photo, Lovely Life: Facing a Family's Secrets

A raw, hard-to-watch new HBO documentary that reminds us just how banal evil can be.

The beauty of the film is that it doesn’t ask you to judge Debi or her mother, so much as to reckon with their complicity, which is fraught and messy and infuriating and tragic all at once.

A gut-wrenching saga about illuminating the darkest corners of private lives, and about the difficulty—and perhaps unjustness—of genuine Christian forgiveness.

A disturbing but ultimately illuminating documentary about the legacy of sex abuse, and how it reverberates across generations

It’s the difficult work of true crime, dwelling with the harm done and reckoning with it in a way that is patient and non-superficial.

To make such a deeply personal and often unflinching work about the abuse committed by a family member is no easy undertaking, though this devastating documentary does so with the necessary care for its subjects while still asking the essential questions.