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LA Stories
Tweet The 60s/70s singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson might have been born in New York, but, as told in Who Is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him), his is a quintessential LA tale of...
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Six for Sheffield
Tweet Sheffield Doc/Fest, one of Europe’s premier showcases for nonfiction film, opens November 3 in England’s Steel City with more than 130 feature docs, shorts, and cross-platform projects on tap....
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Boss on Film
Tweet The mammoth Darkness on the Edge of Town box set finally dropped this week, and with it The Promise, the documentary chronicle of the making of that touchstone 1978 album. As befits Bruce...
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Music Films I’m Thankful For
Tweet I haven’t lived in the US for a while and I no longer eat turkey, so Thanksgiving isn’t quite the event it was in my youth, but I can still appreciate the value of taking a moment to step back...
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Shelter from the Stones
Tweet Tomorrow marks 40 years since the release of Gimme Shelter, Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin’s mesmerizing, harrowing document of the build-up to and execution of The Rolling...
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Hot Wax
Tweet Sound It Out, the latest film from music-minded UK documentarian Jeanie Finlay, gets a sneak peak this weekend as part of the Sideshow cultural season in Nottingham. As detailed by Finlay in a...
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10+1: The Year’s Best Music Docs
Tweet The end of the year is, of course, a time to take stock of what the past 12 months have wrought – usually in nice round numbers. This practice particularly lends itself to the inveterate list...
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It Started at Sundance
Tweet While it’s known best for the presence of Robert Redford, an army of paparazzi, legions of slavering movie execs desperate to find the next breakout indie flick, and snow, the Sundance Film...
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And the Oscar (Occasionally) Goes to …
Tweet The Academy Awards have never been terribly kind to music docs, and Sunday’s 83rd edition will be no exception. To be fair to the notoriously finicky documentary branch, this year’s overall...
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Hit the North
Tweet Since the Beatles stormed out of Liverpool nearly 50 years ago, the North of England has been amazingly fertile musical ground, producing not just strings of great artists but a series of...
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Got Live If You Want It
Tweet Last Friday I posted some reflections on The Last Waltz, inspired by Spout blogger Christopher Campbell’s “Documentary Classics” piece a few days earlier on Martin Scorsese’s filmed record of...
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Cold War Kids
Tweet On August 19, 1991, while Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev holidayed at his Crimean dacha, hard-liners in his government seized power, aiming to reverse the tide of glasnost and perestroika...
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Beats Rhymes & Picks: Michael Rapaport Rocks the Top Hip Hop Docs
Tweet So after we posted today about Michael Rapaport being asked by the Associated Press for his best five music films of all time – and, a man after our own heart, giving ‘em six instead – we caught...
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5+1, CIMMfest Edition: Doing It for the Fans
Tweet The Posters Came From the Walls Most music documentaries are, at heart, made for the fans. Many are made by fans. And sometimes, they’re made about the fans. Or rather, the obsessed: those fans...
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5+1, Record Store Day Edition: Hot Wax 2
Tweet In just five years, International Record Store Day has grown from a shop owners’ cri de coeur that their business isn’t dying into a veritable holiday for music geeks and vinyl heads. Every...
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The Long and Winding Roads: Far-Flung Music Film Journeys
Tweet When Paul Simon went to South Africa in the mid-’80s to record what would become the Grammy-winning, bestselling Graceland album, he was far from the first major Western artist to journey to...
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By the Time We Got to Wattstax: Music Festival Music Films
Tweet Glastonbury Festivals Ltd. is taking its quinquennial year off in 2012, which might be welcome news for the local cows but leaves tens of thousands of lovers of weed, mud, and music (and...
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Monks of Death: Six Music Films About Little-Known Subjects
Tweet Dude the obscure: Jandek Last week, in honor of Searching for Sugar Man’s Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary, Florida weekly New Times Broward-Palm Beach posted a list on its County...
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Sweet Home Chicago: Music Films About Second City Sounds
Tweet Rock on, Chicago: the late, lamented Wesley Willis Carl Sandburg immortalized the brawling, industrial Chicago of a century ago as “hog butcher to the world,” but that toddling town has also...
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Nice Jewish Boys
Tweet Happy Thanksgivukkah! Yes, people – only some of whom are marketers – are using this term in droves for the calendrical collision of the Jewish festival of lights and the American festival of...
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