Sign o' the Times

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• Top 6 Concert Films of All Time

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• Stop Making Sense

  Stop Making Sense, directed by Jonathan Demme and released in 1984, documents Talking Heads' celebrated tour supporting their album Speaking in Tongues, and the film's structural progression — beginning with frontman David Byrne alone on stage before the full band gradually joins him song by song — became one of the most widely praised structural choices in concert film history. Demme's decision to prioritize the actual live performance over crowd reaction shots or backstage interview footage, common in most concert documentaries, gave Stop Making Sense an unusually pure focus on the music and stagecraft itself rather than a broader narrative framing device. Byrne's oversized "big suit," worn during a later portion of the performance, became one of the most visually iconic images associated with both the film specifically and new wave music's broader visual identity during the 1980s. Stop Making Sense is widely regarded by critics as one of the greatest concert films ever made, and a 2023 remastered theatrical rerelease introduced the film to a new generation of audiences decades after its original release, reflecting its sustained critical and cultural significance.

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• The Last Waltz

  The Last Waltz, directed by Martin Scorsese and released in 1978, documents The Band's farewell concert performance, featuring an extensive roster of guest musicians including Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, and Joni Mitchell, giving the film an unusually significant historical gathering of major rock and folk musicians in a single performance. Scorsese's meticulous pre-planning of the film's camera positions and lighting, treating the concert with the same level of cinematographic care typically reserved for scripted narrative filmmaking, set a new technical benchmark for concert film production values. The film's interview segments, interspersed throughout the concert footage, gave audiences direct insight into The Band's internal creative dynamics and their reasons for ending the group's touring career, adding a documentary dimension beyond the performance footage alone. The Last Waltz's combination of an historically significant assembly of major musicians and Scorsese's genuinely cinematic directorial approach has made it widely regarded as one of the greatest concert films ever made, and its influence on subsequent concert filmmaking's technical ambition remains substantial.

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• Woodstock

  Woodstock, released in 1970, documents the massive 1969 music festival that became one of the defining cultural events of the American counterculture movement, and the film's innovative use of split-screen editing let it simultaneously depict performances alongside the massive crowd's reactions and the surrounding festival environment. The film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and its combination of major performances from artists including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and The Who alongside candid footage of the festival's massive, chaotic crowd conditions gave Woodstock a documentary scope well beyond a typical single-artist concert film. Its depiction of the festival's genuine logistical chaos, including massive traffic jams, insufficient sanitation facilities, and torrential rain turning the festival grounds to mud, gave the film an unvarnished authenticity that became inseparable from Woodstock's broader cultural mythology as a moment of countercultural community despite genuinely difficult conditions. Woodstock's massive commercial success helped introduce the film's featured performers to a significantly broader audience than had actually attended the festival itself, and the film remains the definitive visual and audio document of one of the most historically significant events in American music festival history.

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• Amazing Grace

  Amazing Grace documents Aretha Franklin's 1972 live gospel recording sessions at a Los Angeles church, and the resulting album became the best-selling gospel album in music history, though the accompanying concert film footage remained unreleased for more than four decades due to technical synchronization problems with the original recording equipment. Director Sydney Pollack's original 1972 filming failed to use clapperboards to synchronize sound and picture, a basic technical oversight that made the footage essentially unusable for decades until digital technology eventually allowed producers to manually sync the audio and video after extensive post-production work. Franklin herself blocked the film's release for years through legal action, reportedly upset about not having been consulted regarding its distribution, and the film wasn't finally released until 2018, shortly after her death, following a resolution of the legal disputes that had kept it shelved. The film's eventual release captured Franklin at the height of her vocal powers performing gospel material with genuine spiritual intensity, and Amazing Grace is now widely regarded as one of the greatest concert films ever made, despite its remarkable four-decade delay between filming and public release.

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• Homecoming

  Homecoming, released in 2019, documents Beyoncé's celebrated 2018 headlining performance at the Coachella music festival, a show widely praised for incorporating marching band arrangements, step-show choreography, and other elements drawn directly from historically Black college and university culture. The film intersperses concert footage with documentary segments depicting the months of intensive physical training Beyoncé underwent to prepare for the show following the birth of her twins, giving Homecoming a personal narrative dimension beyond the performance footage alone. Its deliberate incorporation of HBCU marching band traditions, majorette dance styles, and Black Greek life stepping traditions brought those specific cultural touchstones to one of the largest mainstream music festival stages in the world, a deliberate artistic statement about representation that drew widespread critical praise. Homecoming's combination of a massive, meticulously choreographed live performance and its documentary depiction of Beyoncé's demanding preparation process has made it one of the most critically acclaimed concert films of the streaming era, and it won the Grammy Award for Best Music Film.

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More in Film & TV

• Hidden Figures

  "Hidden Figures" (2016), directed by Theodore Melfi, dramatizes the true story of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, three Black women mathematicians whose calculations at NASA were critical to the success of the early American space program, based on Margot Lee Shetterly's nonfiction book of the same name. The film brought significant mainstream public attention to the real contributions of Black women "computers" at NASA during the Space Race, a history that had received relatively little prior widespread recognition, and it prompted renewed public interest in and honors for the real Katherine Johnson, who was still alive at the time of the film's release. Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe's central performances drew significant critical acclaim, and the film became a notable box office success, outperforming many contemporary awards-season dramas and demonstrating a substantial mainstream audience for historical stories centered on Black women. Hidden Figures's combination of its overdue mainstream spotlight on real, previously under-recognized NASA scientists and its strong central performances has made it one of the most culturally significant true-story films of its decade.

• 12 Years a Slave

  "12 Years a Slave" (2013), directed by Steve McQueen, dramatizes the true story of Solomon Northup, a free Black man from New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the antebellum South, based on Northup's own 1853 memoir of the same name. Chiwetel Ejiofor's lead performance and Lupita Nyong'o's supporting performance, in her film debut, both drew significant critical acclaim, with Nyong'o winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and the film itself won the Academy Award for Best Picture. McQueen's unflinching, sustained visual approach to depicting the brutality of slavery, including several extended, unbroken takes of violence that the camera refuses to look away from, was widely credited with giving American slavery a more direct and confrontational cinematic treatment than most previous major studio films had attempted. 12 Years a Slave's combination of its direct grounding in Solomon Northup's own historical memoir and Steve McQueen's unflinching directorial approach has made it one of the most acclaimed and historically significant true-story films ever produced.

• Catch Me If You Can

  "Catch Me If You Can" (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, dramatizes the real early life of Frank Abagnale Jr., who successfully impersonated an airline pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer while forging millions of dollars in checks before being caught by an FBI agent, played by Tom Hanks. The film was based on Abagnale's own memoir, and the real Abagnale, who later became a longtime security consultant working with the FBI, served as a consultant on the production, giving the filmmakers direct access to the actual details and methods behind his real-life cons. The film's stylish, buoyant tone and 1960s period production design, paired with John Williams's jazz-inflected score, gave the true story a lighter, more playful cinematic register than many other crime-based true stories, emphasizing the audacious cleverness of Abagnale's real schemes over their consequences. Catch Me If You Can's combination of its direct access to the real Frank Abagnale's own account and its stylish period filmmaking has made it one of the most purely entertaining true-story films ever produced.

• Erin Brockovich

  "Erin Brockovich" (2000), directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Julia Roberts, dramatizes the true story of the real Erin Brockovich, an unemployed single mother who, working as a legal clerk, helped build a massive lawsuit against Pacific Gas & Electric over water contamination in Hinkley, California. Roberts's performance won her the Academy Award for Best Actress, and her portrayal of the real Brockovich's brash, persistent determination in the face of both corporate stonewalling and professional condescension became one of the most acclaimed performances of her career. The real underlying case resulted in a $333 million settlement, at the time the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit in U.S. history, and the real Erin Brockovich served as a consultant on the film and appeared in a small cameo role. Erin Brockovich's combination of Julia Roberts's Oscar-winning lead performance and its grounding in one of the largest environmental settlements in American legal history has made it one of the most acclaimed true-story legal dramas ever produced.

• The Social Network

  "The Social Network" (2010), directed by David Fincher from Aaron Sorkin's screenplay, dramatizes the founding of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University and the subsequent legal disputes with his co-founders and the Winklevoss twins over credit and ownership of the company. Sorkin's screenplay, built around competing depositions and conflicting accounts of the same events, embraced the genuine ambiguity of the real underlying legal disputes rather than presenting a single definitive version of what happened, a structural choice widely praised by critics as an unusually sophisticated approach to dramatizing contested recent history. Jesse Eisenberg's performance as a fictionalized version of Zuckerberg drew significant critical acclaim, and the film's release while the real Facebook was still a relatively young and rapidly growing company gave it an unusually immediate, real-time quality rare for a historical biopic. The Social Network's combination of its sophisticated multi-perspective legal-dispute structure and its unusually immediate proximity to still-unfolding real events has made it one of the most critically acclaimed true-story films of the 21st century.