Devil’s Knot
(Atom Egoyan, USA/Canada, 2013): Atom Egoyan’s adaptation of Mara Leveritt’s non-fiction account of the Robin Hood Hills child murders — which subsequently became internationally notorious as the West...
View ArticleBig Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me
(Drew Nicola, Olivia Mori, USA, 2012): The most heartbreaking story over overlooked ’70s pop genius this side of Badfinger, the Big Star saga might as well be the textbook for critic’s darling power...
View ArticleA Band Called Death
(Jeff Howlett, Mark Covino, USA, 2012): The music made by the band called Death — place: Detroit, period: early ’70s — was a form of intricate, speed-ramped rock that now sounds alarmingly like the...
View ArticleNashville
(Robert Altman, USA, 1975): Robert Altman’s biggest, boldest and most accomplished work, a roiling metaphor for American ambition, ego and pathological showmanship, and the apex of this most innovative...
View ArticleThe Man Who Fell to Earth
(Nicolas Roeg, UK/USA, 1975): By the time David Bowie splashed down somewhere in New Mexico at the beginning of Nicholas Roeg’s super-arty 1975 adaptation of Walter Tevis’s novel, his moody alien...
View ArticleColor Me Obsessed: A Film About the Replacements
Color Me Obsessed: A Film About The Replacements (Gorman Bechard, USA, 2011): If you’ve heard anything about this documentary about Minneapolis’s most revered post-punk band, you already know the hook:...
View ArticleStrange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields
(Kerthy Fix, Gail O’Hara, USA, 2010): If the decade spent by filmmakers Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara shadowing the reclusive Stephin Merritt, heart, head and soul of the alt-pop cult band the Magnetic...
View ArticlePaul Williams Still Alive
(Stephen Kessler, USA, 2012): In 1979, Albert Brooks made Real Life, a movie about a needy, whinging documentary filmmaker so oblivious to the cataclysmic effect his own neuroses were having on the...
View ArticleLive Aid
Even if the 1.9 billion viewers most often cited as Live Aid’s global audience on July 13, 1985 is imprecise, there’s no escaping a few facts. The event, a live music benefit concert for Ethiopian...
View ArticleThe Stone Roses: Made of Stone
(Shane Meadows, UK, 2013): In music as in other matters, sometimes you do in fact have to be there. Such would seem to be the case with Manchester’s legendary groove rock band The Stone Roses, which...
View ArticleO Brother, Where Art Thou?
(Joel and Ethan Coen, USA, 2000): Although the stated mythological referent for Joel and Ethan Coen’s buck-toothed Depression-era delta musical is Homer, the real odyssey undertaken by this...
View ArticleThis is Elvis
(Malcolm Leo, Andrew Solt, USA, 1981): That the most revealing and enduringly fascinating of Elvis docs bears the authorized imprimatur of no less a bloviator, manipulator, carny Svengali and...
View ArticleElvis on Tour
(Robert Abel, Pierre Adidge, USA, 1972): In Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, Peter Guralnick recalls how the King, freshly emboldened by the experience of making his ’68 TV special,...
View ArticleWe Are the Best!
(Lukas Moodysson, Sweden, 2013): As much as anything, the reason Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin) form a punk band is because everybody else at their middle school thinks it’s so uncool....
View ArticleElvis: That’s the Way It Is
(Denis Sanders, USA, 1970/2001): It might say something about the formidable influence of Colonel Tom Parker that he finally got his wish concerning this 1970 Elvis-in-Vegas doc thirty years after it...
View ArticleZiggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars
(D.A. Pennebaker, UK, 1973): By the time D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary of David Bowie’s final show in the 1973 ‘Ziggy Stardust’ tour was released ten years later, it already seemed ancient. For one...
View ArticleThe Last Waltz
(Martin Scorsese, USA, 1978): Almost instantly considered a jewel in the rock-doc crown, Martin Scorsese’s reverentially mounted movie of The Band’s final bow on Thanksgiving Day, 1976 has become...
View ArticleThe Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle
(Julien Temple, UK, 1980): As dubious as it is as history, there are reasons to be grateful for this particular load of bollocks. First, it contains some truly essential stuff, including some of the...
View ArticleSaturday Night Fever
(John Badham, USA, 1977): Nearly forty years after Saturday Night Fever busted disco out of the urban ghetto and sent it to die in the suburbs, it’s clearer than ever that it’s a movie about living...
View ArticleCabin in the Sky
(Vincente Minnelli, USA, 1943): In what certainly qualifies as one of the more dubious but revealing attempts at corporate political correctness, the Warner Brothers’ DVD release of Cabin in the Sky...
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