"So it’s only appropriate that by 1969, when Mick Jagger steps out of a helicopter at Altamont Speedway, in the brilliant rock doc Gimme Shelter, he is promptly punched in the face by a rabid fan. It’s all downhill from there. Here is Mick at his best and worst—decadent druggie, preening queen, rock ‘n’ roll showman, heart-of-gold hustler, unsuccessful snake charmer. David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin are there to beautifully capture the idealism of Woodstock melt and turn into this bad acid trip."

"I have yet to see the Broadway production, but it warms my heart to know this brilliant documentary from Albert and David Maysles has inspired such a thing. An example of how a personal relationship between the filmmaker(s) and subject can in fact benefit the film itself. Fascinating, funny, and sad."

"The documentarians David and Albert Maysles found some real-life Tennessee Williams characters in Edith and Little Edie Bouvier Beale, mother and daughter eccentrics holed up for years in a sagging, cat-and-raccoon-infested mansion in otherwise grand East Hampton. The ladies’ kinship with cousin Jackie Bouvier Kennedy explains their old-money sense of entitlement, but nothing can explain why two people would want to hammer away at each other for decades on end the way these two trapped souls do. Except that maybe you’d do the same thing under the same circumstances. I’d like to think I would, anyway."

"The age of innocence that was the sixties ended, it is often said, at Altamont Speedway, miles from the peace and love of San Francisco, one cold fall evening in 1969. The Rolling Stones, frustrated to have missed out on the Woodstock festival weeks earlier, chose this location to stage their own festival, and taking advice from Jerry Garcia, brought in local Hells Angels chapters to handle security, paying them with as much beer as they could drink. The concert was a disaster, and ended with manslaughter. The documentarian brothers Albert and David Maysles were there to film the run-up to the event, the performance itself, and the aftermath. Mick Jagger has never looked so lost onstage, nor would he be quite so out of control again. Strangely, it seemed only to fuel the Stones’ rise to power—but then, the Beatles were about to call it a day. Essential viewing for anyone who loves contemporary music and the culture that surrounds it."