Jonathan Demme, who helmed Talking Heads’ seminal Stop Making Sense, also directed legendary alt-rocker Neil Young in this surprisingly affecting feature. The duo had previously paired up on music videos and for the Oscar-nominated track that Young wrote for Demme’s Philadelphia (which was used at the end of the movie). Filmed over two nights at Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium, many of the songs came from Young’s Prairie Wind album, which was written following Young’s brush with death from a potentially fatal brain aneurysm earlier in the decade. For the most part, these were tracks the audience had never heard before. Demme (who also manned the camera) and cinematographer Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan) stuck to a resolutely simple setup, leaving the songs — in Young’s plaintive, heartfelt tenor — all the more memorable.
TIME’s take: “The film makes you feel that an artist who always seemed to be standing on the other side of a milewide canyon is suddenly in your living room.”
It could have been titled Let It Bleed. Partially a concert film from the Rolling Stones’ free show at California’s Altamont Speedway in 1969, Gimme Shelter is also a documentary of the violence that would forever be associated with the event. With the notorious Hells Angels motorcycle gang handling security, four people were killed at Altamont; one man, Meredith Hunter, was stabbed to death by a Hells Angels member as the cameras rolled. The three directors — brothers David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin — shot the film over 10 days during the band’s tour. While the music inevitably rocks (it is the Rolling Stones, after all), the film’s inherent tragedy is summed up in a post-concert scene of Mick Jagger, seeing Hunter’s murder unfold on an editing machine, rewind the footage to watch it in slow motion. The 1960s had certainly come to an end.
TIME’s take: “What the filmmakers have unarguably done in these scenes is give brilliant shape and form to a nightmare.”
Richard Dawson, the wisecracking British entertainer who was among the schemers in the 1960s sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes” and a decade later began kissing thousands of female contestants as host of the game show “Family Feud” has died. He was 79.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
