Popular reviews

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  Review by Brianna 2

  nick cave singing: 😈👻💀🎃🦇

  nick cave talking: 🤠🐨🦘

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  Review by Adam Kempenaar ★★★★ 10

  Came in with no real relationship to Nick Cave or his music and loved this trip... It doesn't exactly enter F FOR FAKE territory, but it's just contrived and calibrated enough, with Cave openly musing about his fascination with narratives and instinctive need to embellish his own experiences, that it wouldn't shock me to learn that the "documentary's" only bit of truth – so far as these things go – is what I came in already knowing: Cave is a fringe rock star who spends a lot of time writing and recording songs. Maybe he doesn't live in Brighton, isn't married to a (stunning) woman named Suzie, doesn't have twin boys, doesn't see a therapist, and there's no team of…

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  Review by Graham Williamson ★★★★★ 10

  "I am transforming, I am vibrating - I'm glowing - I'm flying! Look at me now!"

  I used to suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder. It's much better now - I'm miserable all the year round these days - and one of the ways I used to get it under control was to take photos and videos of grey, rainy skies. If I could take the weather that was troubling me and turn it into a matter of exposure lengths and f-stops, I could control it.

  One of the many, many, many revelations of Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth's new film about Nick Cave is that he used to do the same thing. Although Cave never struck me as the sort…

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  Review by theironcupcake ★★★★★ 23

  Seven stories about the greatest living musician, Nick Cave, on the occasion of his birthday.

  1.
  One night when I was approximately thirteen or fourteen years old (circa 2005-2006), I went out at night to get some chocolate soft-serve ice cream from my neighborhood's Carvel shop. Coming back home at about 10:00 PM, I saw that my mom had turned on TCM and was watching the beginning of a film I had never seen before: Wings of Desire. I sat down and immediately became transfixed. I was too young to understand it all, but I knew without a doubt that it was one of the greatest films I had ever seen.

  2.
  On January 19, 2014, when I was 21,…

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  Review by Graham Williamson ★★★★★ 2

  When I talk about editing as a creative art form, I'm thinking of things like showing Nick Cave kicking the air, then cutting in mid-movement to his younger self completing the same move. Poetry, commentary and emotion in one cut.

  This is still brilliant.

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  Review by Lily Schmidt ★★★★★

  "I'D LIKE SOME CHAMPAGNE, SOME COCAINE, AND SOME SAUSAGES." - Nina Simone

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  Review by Steven Sheehan ★★★★ 6

  Nick Cave plays Nick Cave in a 'documentary' that at times seems to encompass larger cinematic proportions than you would typically associate with the genre. The film is presented as his 20,000 day alive since birth, 24 hours in the life of an artist, a husband, a Dad, a dreamer, a realist and a middle-age man living in Brighton. To call this a documentary is not really true in the strictest sense, regularly drifting into the fictional realm so often inhabited by its subjects songs.

  Certainly if you are turned on by the idea of delving into an artists creative process, being taken into the confusing, restless mind that attempts to make sense of their life and world around them…

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  Review by Simon Ramshaw ★★★★★ 3

  Now I will tell you how to slay the dragon.

  20,000 Days on Earth is simply the feeling you get when something higher than yourself is levelling with you. Nick Cave, a being drifting around in the philosophical stratosphere at the dumbest of times, is an artist that I never expected to decipher, nor even appreciate. The trailer of this quasi-documentary suggests further impenetrable ramblings about 'Important Stuff', yet I can't imagine a more inviting and welcoming creation of random musings than this.

  Tinkering with structure playfully, 20,000 Days's concept is slight yet expansive. Following Nick Cave's 20,000th day on Planet Earth (we can only assume he's spent many more days on other planets), it segues between reminiscing about the…

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  Review by Michael Strenski ★★★★

  I always thought Nick Cave was pretty cool but his ability to materialize Kylie Minogue out of thin air and into the backseat of his car is some next level shit.

  (Too bad this wasn't 17,455 Days on Earth though because Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus are better albums than Push the Sky Away.)

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  Review by Auteur ★★★★★

  A portrait of the artist as a God.

  And I thought I loved Nick Cave before watching this film. Directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard pull off something quite remarkable with this fictional documentary that would make Errol Morris blush, that follows Nick Cave around the time of the recording of his latest album, Push The Sky Away. While an absolute boon to fans of the artist, Murder Ballads was a seminal album in my development as a teenager (one of the few I could say shaped me) 20,000 Days On Earth has bigger targets in its sight, including an exploration of the very nature of artistic expression, and can be appreciated by anyone unfamiliar with his work. Many scenes…

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  Review by williamfaeleith ★★★★½

  Back when I was young and the NME (New Musical Express) was my bible, The Birthday Party were one of the darlings of that music paper. So I knew and read all about Nick Cave but for some reason did not ever listen to his music (in those days the only way to listen to bands that didn't get played on the radio was to buy their records or go to see them perform live).
  So when watching this partly-staged, partly-imagined day-in-the-life of Nick Cave, I had mixed emotions. One the one hand, not knowing the songs probably made for a better experience in watching the film, but on the other I realise I've had a whole life of not listening to some great music.
  This imaginative and unusual approach to musical documentary really worked for me, both as a near-fictional drama and as a fascinating insight into the creative process.

  Watched on MUBI.

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  Review by sprizzle ★★★★

  "Miley Cyrus floats in a swimming pool in Toluca Lake"

  Nick Cave is a poet. I won't pretend to understand everything he's saying. I dig his music, and I just sort of leave it at that. A surface level relationship up to this point. This documentary delves a bit deeper into this mysterious, sometimes scary front man of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. Or does it?

  I was a bit turned off by the format of this "documentary" initially. The whole thing is staged. It's filmed like a scripted piece and it most likely is a mostly scripted film. It feels like it's directed by Cave himself. It's a dark, brooding piece, very similar in feel to the music that…