Music films range from pure concert documents to biopics to feature-length audio-visual experiments, and the best of them make you hear differently. Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii and Heartworn Highways show just how far apart two films in this genre can sit while both getting music exactly right. Browse Macca's reviews below.
Rating: 1.5★
There is a particular kind of British comedy export that arrives in cinemas already slightly embarrassed about itself, and Kevin & Perry Go Large (2000) sits comfortably in that tradition. Based on Harry Enfield's recurring sketch characters from Harry Enfield and Chums, the film transplants Kevin the surly
Rating: 3.5★
Ryuichi Sakamoto is one of those rare figures whose career resists easy summary. A founding member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, the pioneering electronic group that shaped Japanese pop and left fingerprints all over Western synth music in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he went on to become one
Rating: 3.0★
Taylor Swift occupies a peculiar position in contemporary culture: she is one of the most commercially successful recording artists on the planet, a figure whose every public move generates column inches, and yet she has remained, for years, genuinely difficult to read as a private person. Miss Americana, released on
Rating: 3.5★
There is something wonderfully audacious about the origins of Sign 'o' the Times. When the album underperformed in the American charts, Prince's response was not a re-release or a carefully targeted new single but to go and make an entire concert film to sell the
Rating: 2.5★
There are films you respect without ever really feeling, and Distant Voices, Still Lives is one of them. I can see exactly why it is held in such high regard, can feel the devotion and the pain baked into every frame, and still come away from it strangely untouched. That
Rating: 3.0★
There is a version of Jazz on a Summer's Day that I could watch on a warm Friday evening with a glass of something cold and feel completely at peace with the world. Bert Stern's 1959 film, a record of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, is
Country United States Of America
There are films you watch and films you remember, and The Jungle Book is firmly in the second camp. I couldn't tell you the first time I saw it, because it feels like it was always just there, woven into the furniture of early memory alongside the smell
Rating: 2.5★
Let me be straight with you: I kept having to remind myself, the whole way through Rags, to judge it for what it actually is rather than what I might want it to be. And what it is, plainly, is a straight-to-television teen musical. A modern, gender-flipped
Rating: 2.5★
There is a version of Entergalactic that works brilliantly, and you can almost see it from where the actual film is sitting. It is there in the colour palette, in the way a single frame freezes into something you would happily hang on a wall, in the deep, unhurried groove
Rating: 3.0★
You cannot watch Anvil! The Story of Anvil without This Is Spinal Tap playing somewhere in the back of your mind. I don't mean that as a backhanded compliment or a cheap joke. It's just that the parallels are so striking, so eerie, that you'
Rating: 3.0★
Every so often a single performer is so magnetic that they drag an entire film up several rungs by sheer force of presence, and Dirty Dancing is one of the purest examples I can think of. Strip Patrick Swayze out of Emile Ardolino's 1987 hit and you are
Rating: 3.5★
When I was sweating through my GCSEs, our school sent us off with an unusual piece of revision advice: go and watch Quadrophenia. Decades on, my daughter now sits in the same classrooms, and the same recommendation is still doing the rounds. There is something perfect about that continuity, because
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