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  • Reviews: Amy (2015)
  • 2015 Films

Reviews: Amy (2015)

Governing Committee July 2, 2015 4 minutes read

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amy

amyHere are review links for this film submitted by our members:

  • [New – 2/25/16] | Marco Albanese @ Stanze di Cinema [Italian]
    • Excerpt: Amy non aiuta certo a comprendere l’artista Winehouse, trasformandosi nel ritratto impietoso di una ragazza morta troppo presto, un’anima in pena, incapace di equilibrio, a cui tutti hanno chiesto qualcosa, senza restituire molto.
  • Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Cafe Texan
  • Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
  • Laura Clifford @ Reeling Reviews
    • Excerpt: By the time [Kapadia]’s finished you’ll come away from “Amy” realizing that she was done in more by exploitation than anything she did to herself.
  • Jim Dixon @ Examiner.com
  • Mark Dujsik @ Mark Reviews Movies
    • Excerpt: In a way, Amy gives Winehouse a final act of defiance—to force us to see her for who she was, instead of what everyone wanted her to be.
  • Candice Frederick @ Reel Talk Online
  • Susan Granger @ www.susangranger.com
    • Excerpt: Disturbing and disconcerting, following this talented pop idol on her deadly downward spiral…
  • Mark Hobin @ Fast Film Reviews
    • Excerpt: Friend Tony Bennet compares her to the likes of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. It might sound like hyperbole, but coming as it does near the end of this documentary, it sounds perfectly reasonable.
  • Blake Howard @ Graffiti With Punctuation
  • MaryAnn Johanson @ FlickFilosopher.com
    • Excerpt: An immense film, looming in tragedy, an infuriating portrait of how celebrity warps artistry and how wealth warps love and how suffering trumps everything.
  • Kristin Dreyer Kramer @ NightsAndWeekends.com
  • Donald Jay Levit @ ReelTalk Movie Reviews
  • Dan Lybarger @ ArkansasOnline.com
    • Excerpt: British filmmaker Asif Kapadia has made a career out of piecing other people’s home video into insightful feature documentaries. With Amy, Kapadia manages to assemble a wealth of worthwhile material and a far deeper understanding of the seemingly overexposed Amy Winehouse.
  • Alan Mattli @ Facing the Bitter Truth [German]
    • Excerpt: Asif Kapadia’s solid, if conventional, documentary about the life and death of singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse strikes an even balance between journalistic thoroughness and emotional bias.
  • Jared Mobarak @ Jared Mobarak Reviews
    • Excerpt: I get the film is painting a portrait of Amy Winehouse and to fans it comprehensively supplies a definitive account, but for me it’s a missed opportunity to overtly talk about celebrity pressure with fame and the media assisting in the dismantling of good people. The result is more puff piece than crucial—a compilation of interviews and behind the scenes footage showing exactly what we’ve already seen.
  • Pat Mullen @ Cinemablographer
    • Excerpt: It’s hard to recover from Amy without having a slight sense of guilt that one essentially killed Amy Winehouse by loving the slurring train wreck of her star persona.
  • Stefan Pape @ HeyUGuys
  • Jason Pirodsky @ Expats.cz
    • Excerpt: The film ends on a note of profound sadness, offering no answers or commentary, but it’s almost a relief when the inevitable occurs.
  • Clark Provence @ 365 Movie Guy
    • Excerpt: This is often an uncomfortably horrifying film, because it never allows us to retreat to the relative safety of the present. We’re trapped in the vortex of this young woman’s life, watching her spiral further out of control and knowing that she will not escape.
  • Jonathan Richards @ www.jonrichardsplace.com
    • Excerpt: It’s an agonizingly slow trainwreck, a good half hour too long, unsettling and memorable.
  • Jerry Roberts @ Armchair Cinema
    • Excerpt: We follow the journey of Amy Winehouse, a pretty Jewish girl born in Southgate London with a gift bestowed by God, contained in a personality that was all too human. I admit I knew the voice but I never really considered the person behind it. Through startlingly private home movie footage, we catch Winehouse through the years as success finds her all too quickly. Her personality reveals a young woman with the heart of a lion, bound up in a girl whose teenage insecurities were still lurking about. Britney may have bellowed that she was “Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” but Amy seemed to be living it. We can always see in her eyes at times a determination to make something of herself, but always behind it is the fear that she may not get there.
  • Cole Smithey @ ColeSmithey.com
    • Excerpt: [VIDEO ESSAY] “Amy” is an essential document toward understanding the social climate and personal relations that snuffed out a troubled but gifted woman whose success proved too much to endure without drugs, booze, and dysfunctional relationships.
  • Dusty Somers @ Cinema Sentries
  • Frank Swietek @ One Guys Opinion
    • Excerpt: A technically proficient portrait that aims to be appreciative of the singer’s talent and sympathetic to her problems while not papering over the destrictive elements of her personality.
  • Sarah Ward @ artsHub

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