Metacritic reviews

If you are interested in the history of cinema, this is a very unique lens to look at it through.

The title may sound incendiary, something left over from the Russ Meyer era, but Danny Wolf’s Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies turns out to be informative and even-handed as well as entertaining.

Nudity, as “Skin” captures in its lively and disarming way, is the great leveler: the thing that makes us all gawk, no matter what the context.

Skin certainly has its blemishes, but it’s occasionally excited and secure in its willingness to build an off-the-cuff alt history for an under-discussed facet of filmmaking.

It’s thorough, almost academic textbook/video-accompanying-a-film-studies-class broad in its scope.

Considering that the entire movie is about pushing boundaries — for art, profit or both — it’s disappointing that director Danny Wolf tells the story in such a tediously prosaic way — though this, too, might be a crafty strategic move, as the many copyright owners being shrugged at here might have gotten a lot angrier had “Skin” been an exciting, innovative work, as opposed to a merely informative one.

Talking heads often go on long enough to distract from the overall thesis, and the runtime, while not particularly long, buries its own arc between the then and the now.