70 Greatest Music Documentaries of All Time

From Maximum R&B-playing mods to arena-rock anthem makers: Jeff Stein’s scrapbook of the Who’s career collects tidbits from the band’s TV appearances, Woodstock performance footage, interviews and other flotsam and jetsam in an attempt to pay tribute to one of rock’s greatest (and loudest) groups. Like the quartet themselves, the movie is often disjointed, totally chaotic, and hits with the force of a Fender Stratocaster being smashed on a stage. It also doubles as a history of rock and roll’s British Invasion-and-beyond era, as blues fixations give way to Pop Art, feedback, psychedelica, ambitious attempts at high-art evolution and self-expression, and the power of a well-placed power chord. It also inspired the “This one goes to 11” scene from This Is Spinal Tap, for which we owe this movie an immeasurable debt. —D.F.

Yes, there are ridiculous dream sequences (or are they?!?!) involving pastoral reveries, swords, horses, Tommy guns and wizardsploitation, the kind that suggest profundity only if you’ve been using Physical Graffiti‘s gatefold for seed harvesting. But for years, this was the best live document we had regarding the mighty Led Zeppelin, and for all the giggles over the goofy mysticism in this midnight-movie staple, this movie still captures the experience of seeing a huge band fill a huge auditorium with an even huger sound. It also doubles nicely as a time capsule for overall Seventies rock excess, down to the Golden-God bulges, incredible drum solos (sticks optional) and indulgent guitar solos (bows not optional). DF

The word “live” in the movie title is a bit of a red herring when it comes to Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, since the only audience in the oldest surviving Roman amphitheater in the world is the film’s crew. But it’s also what makes it all so entrancing. Seeing Floyd bookend a set of late-Sixties space-rock triumphs like “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” and enfant terrible gong-banging freak-outs with Meddle‘s “Echoes” – while watching it all seem to evanesce into the air, amidst the weeds, ancient sculptures and molten lava of Pompeii (with an assist from a barking dog) – seems like the perfect setting for the group. With the addition of some trippy camera effects and studio footage of the group making Dark Side of the Moon, Pompeii became the ultimate document of psych-rock’s transition into prog. —K.G.

There’s a good reason nobody made a Velvet Underground documentary before Todd Haynes came along and did it in 2021: Archival footage of the group is extremely minimal, especially from the period after 1968 when they stopped working with Andy Warhol and the attention he brought to their work largely vanished. But Haynes wasn’t interested in preparing a Behind the Music-style documentary that traced their saga in a traditional fashion. Instead, he wanted to immerse viewers in the New York avant-garde scene that made the band possible, and create an impressionistic portrait of their art. The voices of Lou Reed and Sterling Campbell are present via old footage; surviving members John Cale and Maureen Tucker are the primary narrators. They bring a different perspective to the story since Reed’s version of V.U. history was dominant for so long, even if it means the brilliant post-Cale albums don’t get nearly enough screen time. But the overall effect is mesmerizing, giving you an incredible sense of where this band came from, why they mattered and why they were destined to inevitably, gloriously flame out. —A.G.

Two years after the landmark Lonely Boy brought cinema vérité techniques backstage, the Maysles Brothers hitched a ride with the Fab Four on their first trans-Atlantic trip. Although Richard Lester would (lightly) fictionalize similar scenarios in A Hard Day’s Night, no camera before or since ever got so close to capturing John, Paul, George and Ringo in anything like their natural state; you can almost see the walls coming up as they realize how unavoidably public their lives are about to become. The DVD version, retitled The First U.S. Visit, swaps out scenes highlighting the drudgery of promo-tour obligations in favor of the band’s Ed Sullivan Show performances — a fair trade, but it’s worth seeking out the original, which still screens in theaters occasionally. SA

Spike Lee captures David Byrne’s Broadway performance-art-cum-greatest-hits revue for posterity, and ends up delivering way, way more than just a concert film. It’s the sort of joyous collaboration between a filmmaker and a musician that lifts up the form, much the way Byrne and his gray-suited band of singers, dancers and instrumentalists lift up the audience’s (and your) spirits. Lee snakes his camera through the performers onstage, gives you perspectives ranging from the rafters to the back rows and enhances several numbers (notably their cover of Janelle Monae’s protest song “Hell You Talmbout”). And like the production, it’s a wonderful showcase for Byne’s outsider-artist optimism that, for two hours, makes you feel the title’s two words aren’t contradictory. —D.F.

At the age of 19, Amy Winehouse signed a publishing deal with EMI. At 23, she’d release the 2006 album Back to Black and be considered one of the greatest vocalists in the history of popular music. At 27, Winehouse would be found dead from alcohol poisoning. Asif Kapadia’s portrait of the black-bouffanted British powerhouse doesn’t spare us the tragedy of her life, or the mercurial relationships in her life that contributed to her becoming a tabloid fixture and a casualty. But the movie also doesn’t skimp on Winehouse’s music, and you understand how the soul into those songs turned them into something immortal and timeless. —D.F.

In the summer of 1969, while all the media attention was focused upstate on Woodstock, a music festival in a Harlem park that took place over six Sundays brought together everyone from Sly and the Family Stone to BB King to the Staples Singers, and many, many more. The concerts were captured for posterity, and then the footage sat in a basement for decades. Unearthed and assembled by Roots drummer Questlove Thompson and released in 2021, the resulting doc Summer of Soul is an almost too-timely example of a landmark historical moment finally getting its just exposure. Highlight: Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson’s for-the-ages rendition of  “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” in one of the most powerful live performances ever filmed. —J.D.

Impossibly beautiful, incredibly smart, surprisingly candid and fiendishly calculating, the Madonna of Truth or Dare is adept at soaking up every inch of the spotlight. Director Alek Keshishian’s documentary about the singer’s Blond Ambition Tour purports to offer a closer look at the Material Girl, but her media sophistication is too formidable, making us always question who’s the “real” Madonna: the savvy businesswoman or the needy brat. What’s not in dispute, however, is that her eye-popping, ear-candy concert performances slay. —T.G.

Far more people claim to have attended Woodstock than was feasibly possible, and it’s likely Michael Wadleigh’s watershed, kaleidoscopic documentary is to blame. The film captures the three-day festival over three immersive hours (a 1994 re-release pushed it to close to four), often employing split-screen to accommodate spectacles both onstage (blistering sets by Hendrix, the Who, and Richie Havens) and off (traffic jams, overtaxed Port-a-Potties, and open-air sex). An Oscar winner and box office smash in 1970, Woodstock also launched the still thriving collaboration between co-director Martin Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker. Just as crucially, it’s warned several generations away from the brown acid. EH

If Metallica had a love of the absurd, you could accuse them of staging their sessions with band therapist Phil Towle as an attempt to make their own This Is Spinal Tap. But when Lars Ulrich starts fielding grievances from his longtime bandmates with couples-therapy mirroring — “What I hear you saying is…” — it’s no longer clear who the joke is on. Filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky were only tapped for a making-of featurette, but when it became clear that one of the world’s biggest rock bands was in the midst of a collective existential crisis, they stuck around and captured an indelible record of the live-wire dynamics that make any creative enterprise work, and often doom them to failure. How good is Some Kind of Monster? It almost makes you want to listen to St. Anger again. —S.A.

From the moment Beyoncé Knowles, dressed as a modern-day Nefertiti, strutted down a catwalk at the 2018 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in the first of two headlining sets, you knew these would be historic shows — that year’s edition didn’t end up being dubbed “Beychella” for nothing. Had Homecoming been nothing but raw footage of her iconic performances over those consecutive weekends, we’d still consider it one of the best music docs of the past decades. But this peek at the creation of those epic concerts, so-directed by Beyoncé herself, also gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at how much hard work she put into this mix of marching bands, dancers and revised renditions of her greatest hits together, and the way she used her moment in the festival spotlight to shout out Civil Rights leaders, HBCU’s and black culture of the past and present. All hail the Queen B. —D.F.

You can never discount the importance to documentary filmmaking of being in the right place at the right time, and from June 16-18, 1967, that place was the Monterey County Fairgrounds. With his cameras roaming through the crowd in the hands of Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles, director D.A. Pennebaker captured not only the musical performances — from the Who, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and many others, most of which were phenomenal — but the flower-power culture that sustained them. Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar alight is Monterey Pop‘s iconic image, but Otis Redding bringing Southern soul to the hippie nation was no less revolutionary. —S.A.

A multimedia mix of Kurt Cobain’s home movies, journal entries, drawings, notebook scrawlings and audio recordings (buffered, naturally, by vintage interview excerpts and concert clips), Brett Morgen’s documentary is more than just a must-see for Nirvana fans. It’s a collective labor of love that offers an unfiltered peek into the singer-songwriter’s mindset, from the first creative stirrings to the spiral downward. By the time it ends with Cobain thanking his Unplugged audience, you feel as if you know the man himself.  —D.F.

Music documentaries tend to focus on the already-famous — why devote two hours to some band you never heard of? — but Penelope Spheeris’ document of the Los Angeles punk scene caught its subjects when they were still on the ground: At one point, X’s Exene Cervenka worries about the backlash that would ensue if they started charging $6 a ticket. (Black Flag’s Ron Reyes proudly shows off the sleeping quarters he paid $16 a month for: a utility closet in a crumbling deconsecrated church.) Although the songs are literally subtitled for the punk-impaired, Decline makes few concessions to delicate sensibilities: the movie dives into the mosh pit and lets you fend for yourself. —S.A.

It only took 46 years to see it, but this legendary concert film chronicling Aretha Franklin’s two-night stand at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church — the same 1972 shows that gave us Franklin’s classic live gospel album — was more than worth the wait. Sydney Pollack’s movie isn’t a document of a performance so much as a visual extension of the ecstasy that the singer, her collaborators and the crowd experienced; no matter how many times you’ve heard her interpretations of “Wholy Holy” or “Never Grow Old,” the sight of Franklin, eyes closed and head bowed, working her way through those numbers feels like a revelation. (Watching the choir jump up and egg Aretha on as she testifies during the title track is capable of reducing an entire theater to nothing but goosebumps and teardrops.) Witness the Queen of Soul do those stellar runs and work the audience, from everyday churchgoers to Mick Jagger, into a divine frenzy, and you’ll feel as if you’ve seen the face of God. —D.F.

What was Talking Heads’ strategy for their euphoric, propulsive 1984 concert film? “We didn’t want any of the bullshit,” drummer Chris Frantz told Rolling Stone. “We didn’t want the clichés.” Eschewing pandering audience shots and focusing instead on evocative lighting and imaginative set design, Jonathan Demme captures the band at their creative peak, rolling through songs from their then-latest LP, Speaking in Tongues, while brilliantly reimagining old favorites like “Once in a Lifetime” and a solo-David-Byrne-with-boom-box version of “Psycho Killer.” It’s 88 minutes of endless up — a joyous marriage of New Wave, funk and Byrne’s inspired, demented stagecraft. —T.G.

The beauty of the Rolling Stones came from their hedonistic embrace of rock’s sex-and-danger ethos. The horror of this documentary comes from its clear-eyed view of the band’s kinetic live power, which could be both hypnotic and terrifying in its intensity. Gimme Shelter is best remembered for its chilling finale — the death of concertgoer Meredith Hunter at the Stones’ free 1969 show at Altamont — but throughout, directors Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin craft a spellbinding sense of the band’s dark energy, which suggested liberation and nihilism. And Mick Jagger’s final reaction shot is haunting. —T.G.

When the Band decided to hang it up with one last show in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day 1976, they threw a wake rather than a funeral. Directed by Martin Scorsese right before he dove into Raging Bull, this concert film is, first and foremost, a celebration of the American-Canadian quintet who helped bring our nation’s musical past into the present. But it’s also a salute to their inspirations and peers, with performances from Neil Young and Muddy Waters intercut with interviews of individual Band members reminiscing about the sights they’ve seen and the lessons learned. Sure, The Last Waltz is nostalgic, but the richness of the music and the overpoweringly elegiac tone give the film a timelessness that’s transporting. Even Neil Diamond kills. —T.G.

Even if you’ve never seen Don’t Look Back, you know it by heart. The “Subterranean Homesick Blues” opener — nicked by everyone from INXS to Bob Roberts — is the most obvious cultural reference point, but in a larger sense this documentary of Bob Dylan’s 1965 U.K. tour is the permanent blueprint for the public’s image of mid-Sixties rock & roll. The glories and agonies of the road, the exuberance of a quicksilver new talent setting the world on fire, the clueless journalists: Director D.A. Pennebaker’s handheld camera captured it all. In the process, he made Dylan an icon, galvanized a generation and helped transform a singular moment in the evolution of “youth music” into riveting, indelible drama. —T.G.