Salt of the Earth

This Oscar-nominated documentary charts the 40-year career of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, whose horribly beautiful black-and-white images of slave labor and genocide and exodus form a visual timeline of human suffering on the planet. The venerable German filmmaker and documentarian Wim Wenders co-directs, along with Salgado's son Juliano, but you get the impression that Wenders only came aboard to shape decades of disparate material into this coffee table book of a movie. After an awkward first act, The Salt of the Earth settles into a comfortable rhythm, following Salgado's nomadic career across several continents, from the gold mine at Serra Pelada to the Kurdish refugee camps. But there are also a number of contentious family dynamics that the film sets up and then neglects to explore (at a certain point, Salgado's wife simply disappears), and ultimately this feels more like a greatest hits collection than a unique work of art. D.B.