Best Music Movies to Watch (Page 2)

A music documentary with its star as one of its main talking heads runs the risk of coming off like cheap PR, but Tina Turner’s own articulate insights never restrict this retrospective on her life. If anything, she assists directors Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin in expanding the film’s scope to cover the origins of […]

At first, On-gaku: Our Sound seemed to be a classic coming-of-age story centered around a battle of the bands. The delinquent kids find a new outlet through music, and thus, change as a result of the art. But the indie animated drama proves to be different, because the band Kobujutsu don’t transform into rock stars […]

Frank Zappa’s creative scope could barely be defined –  a mix of rock, composition, design, and in his early days even filmmaking.  This documentary does its best to summarize the un-summarizable, starting with Zappa’s last time playing guitar and going back to early details like an infatuation with explosives as a kid.  Zappa’s overwhelmingly full […]

Directed by Todd Haynes (I’m Not There, Carol), The Velvet Underground takes an avant-garde approach to tell the story of the 1960s rock band. Like their music, nothing about this documentary is linear and expected. Screens are split to show two different things at once, seemingly unrelated clips are stitched to create a patchwork of […]

This fun comedy-drama is about a New York playwright called Radha who never hit big. When she turns 40, she decides to reinvent herself as RadhaMUSPrime, a rapper. And it’s all a personal affair: Radha Blank plays the main character (named after herself) and is also the writer, director, and producer. The story is about […]

Legendary Talking Heads frontman David Byrne returns with this enigmatic stage show, and with Spike Lee in tow, the film reaches for the heights of the iconic concert doc Stop Making Sense. For those unfamiliar, Stop Making Sense directed by Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs) captured the Talking Heads’ invigorating live show in their […]

A simple movie about a Scottish country singer with a dream to go to Nashville, U.S.A and reach stardom. It starts with her leaving prison to return to her mom’s house, where her kid was being raised in her absence. Heavy stuff, but this girl is determined to let nothing get in the way of […]

At the first few moments, Song Lang seemed to be something akin to Farewell My Concubine– the film takes a snapshot of a communist Asian country in a different time, through the lens of a regional opera form with painted faces, elaborate costumes, and captivating tunes. But there’s more to Song Lang than this. Tragedy […]

Beastie Boys Story, a live documentary that runs for two hours and consists entirely of two speakers presenting a PowerPoint onstage, shouldn’t be as enjoyable and enthralling as it is, but with the help of director Spike Jonze, remaining band members Mike D and Adam Horovitz pull off the impossible and draw in a rapt […]

Admittedly, it’s hard to watch the first twenty minutes of Dinner in America. The slurs are gratuitous, the suburban families are superficially satiric, and it seemed at first glance the leads were, too. But when the punk singer and his awkward fan meet, and they start driving around the Midwest, there’s a charming chemistry formed […]

Even if you’re a huge Broadway fan, you’ve probably never heard of the “industrial musical.” While it no longer exists in practice, in the 1970s industrial musicals were shows that corporations commissioned for some of the biggest Broadway names to produce. The script would be based on the company’s offerings and history, and privately performed […]

A biopic is only as big as the personality at its center, and what a personality Pavarotti had. The Opera singer that crossed into the mainstream from his humble upbringings in Modena, Italy, exuded happiness and had a great outlook on life. And even as the attention he would eventually attract takes its tole, he’s […]

While most media outlets would rather talk about Taylor Swift’s love life and never-ending feuds, the fact remains that Swift is a dedicated artist. She’s a prolific songstress and an astute writer, and regardless of what you think of her, it’s always a treat to see someone with that much passion and talent delve deep […]

This twisted movie is actually two movies, the credits even roll in between. The first half is gorgeous: talented dancers get together for a party and perform beautiful contemporary dance sequences. They introduce themselves through their audition tapes to join the dance group, but also through conversations at the party. The second half is less […]

Howard Ashman was at the peak of his career—fresh off Little Mermaid’s sweeping win at the Grammys and Oscars, and concocting the iconic songs that would make up Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast—when he died of AIDS at 40. But even at that relatively young age, Ashman already had a lifetime’s worth of work […]

Entergalactic, a vibrant animated romcom from the mind of musician Kid Cudi, follows new neighbors Jabari (Cudi) and Meadow (Jessica Williams) as they navigate their way through the ups and downs of modern love. They’re both established artists at the height of their careers, but when it comes to romance, they’re still scraping for lessons, […]

Michael Jackson’s death triggers the sudden unraveling of a young imam’s buttoned-up life in this idiosyncratic Egyptian character study. The news of the singer’s passing sets Khaled (Ahmed El-Fishawy) straining against reawakened memories of his youth as a mullet-sporting MJ fanatic, before his joyful creative spark was stamped out by two disparate forces: a mocking, […]

Heavy Trip is a comedy about a heavy metal band, but unlike many mainstream portrayals, it doesn’t dismiss the genre and its fans as overly aggressive, overly serious, or satanic. Instead, these misfits are endearingly goofy. While they growl over their frustrations, they’re totally sincere about their passion, willing to headbang even in the places […]

This international comedy-drama in French, Greek, and Turkish is about a free-spirited Greek girl who travels to Istanbul on a mission to help her father. Once there, she meets Avril, a French woman whose plans to help Syrian refugees have backfired. Together, they embark on a music-inspired adventure to Lebos from Turkey. Director Tony Gatlif, […]

In this unique Spanish drama-thriller, a famous 90s popstar called Lila loses her memory and forgets how to perform. A big fan of hers, Violeta, is offered the unique opportunity of helping her idol find herself again. Quién te cantará, which translates to “who will sing to you” is a fascinating exploration of fandom and […]

As the title suggests, My Mind & Me is a documentary that reckons with the mental state of a pop star who shot to fame at an early age and who, now in her 30s, continues to deal with the destabilizing pressures of celebrity. This is Selena Gomez in her most open state, frankly sharing […]

This cult classic is the first hip-hop movie in cinema’s history — and, aptly, one of the most sampled movies in rap music. With a cast drawn exclusively from the NYC graffiti, breakdancing, and rap subcultures that it spotlights, Wild Style wisely doesn’t try too hard to construct a conventional drama. Instead, there are toe-tapping […]

For the background singers featured in 20 Feet from Stardom, music is a vocation. It is not merely an occupation or a pastime; it is a way of life, a “higher calling,” as the legendary Lisa Fischer would say. For 90 minutes, director Morgan Neville superbly maps out the development of back-up singing in the […]

In the last years of their partnership, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger decided to take on another art form in The Tales of Hoffmann. Jacques Offenbach’s opera is excellently adapted with similar extravagance to The Red Shoes, only this time, rather than limiting the performance in one sequence, the entire film is sung-through and plays […]

Given the subject matter of Charles Perrault’s Donkeyskin, it’s not surprising that Disney didn’t adapt this one. It’s not just that it’s too similar to Cinderella, with a donkey instead of a goose that lays gold, it’s also most probably because of the strange incestuous wedding proposal presented at the start. Yikes. But filmmaker Jacques […]

Plenty of films have been made about the grueling climb to rock-and-roll fame, but few carry the effortless charm that That Thing You Do! has. Written and directed by Tom Hanks, the film is as cookie-cutter as it gets, dodging the dark depths that typically haunt rock biopics. But that isn’t to say That Thing […]

This fascinating documentary traces the roots of freestyling back to the rhythmic sermons of Baptist preachers, the improvisational energy of jazz music, and the spoken word artistry of the civil rights era’s Last Poets — but, like the form of rap it chronicles, it largely exists in the moment. The ephemeral nature of freestyling makes […]

In Amy, Kapadia eschews talking heads for something more intimate: home videos, photographs, and phone messages from Winehouse’s earliest and closest friends, which he stitches together to reintroduce a version of the singer that has, up till this point, been ignored by the public. It’s an attempt to reverse Winehouse’s vilified public persona, not by […]

Not everyone gets to go after their ambitions without any reservations, but everyone is free to dream. Hustle & Flow depicts a unique midlife crisis of a pimp that’s been in the game for too long, but while the premise somewhat seems superficial, the way writer-director Craig Brewer depicts it is not. It takes familiar […]

Widely regarded as one of the finest concert movies of all time, Stop Making Sense depicts musical innovators The Talking Heads at the height of their game. Directed by Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia), and starring the eccentric and energetic David Byrne, the show is a marvel of perfectly executed choreography and […]

This documentary is about the life of New York rapper Nas around the time of the release of his first album, Illmatic. It spans a quick and summarized 74 minutes and, while embellished by the direction of street artist One9, it remains a great snippet of recent American history. Nas’s album was a reflection of […]

Amy Berg’s documentary offers an insightful account of one of the most revered and iconic rock and roll singers of all-time, from her musical rise in the 1960s to her battle with alcohol and heroin addiction. Janis Joplin’s independent spirit and sense of not fitting in are meticulously presented in the film through archival footage, […]