Popular reviews

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  Review by Emma 🔆 ★★★★½ 2

  The most important thing I learned from this was that David Bowie really wanted everybody to know that he was a Capricorn

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  Review by Abby ★★★★½ 4

  Less a documentary and more a visual and audio bombardment to inject David Bowie straight into your soul. And I loved it.

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  Review by Sienna 4

  Sorry to all my friends when this drops. I am a bowie fan first and a person second

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  Review by ♦️•Lily•💋 ★★★★★ 3

  Cinemas should hand out edibles for screenings of this the same way they give you 3d glasses

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  Review by ♦️•Lily•💋 ★★★★★ 3

  “it’s what you do in life that’s important, not how much time you have.”

  Incredibly overwhelming in its presentation and yet still manages to be frequently beautiful and life affirming. Seeing this in imax felt like a religious experience.

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  Review by Joaco 11

  This is my joker

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  Review by Will Sloan

  This is 2+ hours of music I love, so obviously I had a fairly good time. That said, I could have done without all the out-of-context snippets from Bowie’s interviews, where he delivers a bunch of meandering pseudo-profundities and generally sounds like David Brent. More music, please! How about “I’m Afraid of Americans”?

  Pretty wild to see Bowie fully reclaimed as a queer/nonbinary hero a full 25 years after Todd Haynes made a whole movie accusing him of cynically co-opting queerness and then tossing it aside the second it stopped being useful. Also wild that this movie finds a way to tell his life story without once mentioning his debilitating drug addiction. I mean, come on, he didn’t go to…

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  Review by Scout Tafoya ★★½ 23

  97/200

  Someday someone will make a movie about David Bowie that doesn’t obfuscate his actual achievements and rely on very literal language of myth but uhh today’s not that day. Stupefyingly unimaginative, this uses footage from movies starring Bowie (footage with one set of specific intentions) and footage of movies Bowie probably watched (with a completely different set of intentions at best tangentially related to what Bowie got out of them, at worst horrifically literal interpretations of what Bowie used them for - the flip side of Todd Haynes’ use of the vanguard of American avant-garde in Velvet Underground, which was about creating a bedrock of experimental grammar into which the Velvets projected themselves) and every half hour something Morgen…

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  Review by Ella Kemp ★★★★½ 1

  Just spectacular, what an incredible achievement. Can see this turning like into love, it’s so often overwhelming yet perfectly judged at almost every turn. A real treasure.

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  Review by fran hoepfner ★★½ 1

  I am grateful to be moving past the talking heads/behind the music-style musician documentary, but it’s hard to look at this in comparison to other music docs of late and think it’s doing much better. Bowie himself is an undeniable presence and a charismatic workhorse, and the concert footage is really great, but I don’t find the form here doing much for the content. took me a long time to find a pace with this, and then I was a little peeved when it, like Bowie, leveled out in its back half into something more traditional if not traditional-appearing. I once told my mom that pop Bowie was my fav iteration of Bowie and she said, “then you don’t like Bowie; you like pop music that was, at one point in time, made by David Bowie.” imagine watching this on a laptop! the horror

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  Review by jeffborislow ★★★★ 3

  Overwhelming in a good way

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  Review by san ★★★★½

  it begins with Bowie talking about how complicated time is as a concept, and then for the next two hours and something minutes time stops making sense. what is the opposite of a sensory deprivation tank? whatever it’s called (maybe the electric chair), it felt like being inside of that. it’s an experience that is numbingly overwhelming at times, yet it is still effectively emotional at its core. very aptly maximalist for an artist who was so adamant in his philosophy that life must be explored to its fullest potential.