#music-documentary

#music-documentary

The Sundance Film Festival's days in Park City are drawing to a close, but its online component, which allows viewers to stream every movie in its competitive sections and a handful of others, is still going strong, at least through midnight on Sunday. The lineup excludes some of the festival's starry premieres-sorry, you'll have to head to a theater to see the Charli XCX mockumentary The Moment, out this Friday-but there's still plenty to sample, even from a relatively weak lineup.

Becoming Led Zeppelin, a film about the British band that dominated the music industry in the 1970s, was the most successful feature documentary at the US box office in 2025, taking over $10m. (Taylor Swift's The Official Release Party of a Showgirl grossed considerably more, with $34m, but as an album-promoting clipshow it is evidently in a different category.) Despite breaking up in 1980 after the death

The bumper crop of archival material is drawn from the Toronto band's six-show stint behind the May album Who Will Look After The Dogs?, which took them to successively bigger hometown venues-each with a place in the band's own lore-joined by guests including Jeff Rosenstock and Nobro.

Devouring the new Nick Cave documentary on Sky, I am reminded how critics go wild for arty musicians who constantly change direction and dabble in everything. This is its own kind of myth. I know plenty of artists who keep moving one week they're sewing fish scales on to jackets, the next they're painting mirrors or putting seahorses in samovars. The problem is, no one cares.

Being able to share this moment globally with my fans, who can experience this together in a movie theater, is more special than I can put into words,

Critic Waldemar Januszczak begins a docu-trilogy on art's most controversial topics with a blisteringly explicit, absolute hoot of a look at sex. What our reviewer said No amount of jackhammering antique buttocks can muffle your gasps of gratitude that there is still, in 2025, a place where Januszczak's brand of factual entertainment considered, accessible, unapologetically adult is allowed to exist. Sarah Dempster Read the full review

One of the cruelest tricks played on the North American women's movement is the way the caricatures, over time, have edged out reality: the ritualized bra burnings ( never happened), the batik hemp dresses (not since the 1970s), the strictly enforced misandry (only on holidays). With regard to Lilith Fair, the late-'90s touring festival of female artists co-founded by Sarah McLachlan, so many jokes were made about "bi-level" haircuts and juice tents and "Lesbopalooza" that the purpose and power of Lilith have largely been relegated to the archives. "I just recently discovered there was an all-female music festival from 1997 to 1999, and I am shook to my core," a young woman exclaimed on TikTok two years ago, prompting consternation from Millennial and Gen X elders at the loss of some of our crucial cultural herstory.

But much like the Coral's music, there's an eccentric, unpretentious charm to this film. Visually, it is an imaginative collage of childhood photos and lo-fi animation mixed with archive footage and home movies. There are no modern-day talking heads, only voiceover narration and the fact that we lose track of which band member is talking kind of fits with their collective ethos.

It's difficult because it's our story, and it was a difficult one because when you come from tough enough beginnings, and I was never very academic.