"To look at Mick Jagger’s creative output today, working hard to suggest the dynamism of his early career, you may wonder what it is he is straining to return to. This film offers an answer. Rock and roll, particularly British rock of the late sixties and early seventies, featured pioneering, Dionysian front men who lured their fans, male and female, into a bacchanal of sex, drugs, and blistering music. Those gatherings were often combustible. In this case, tragic. The remarkable Maysles brothers and Ms. Zwerin fashion a kind of cinematic, pop Warren Commission of the Altamont Speedway concert/crime scene. You don’t need drugs to get high watching the Stones at their peak. The band, and especially Jagger, are a drug."

"Ripe with tenor and trouble. The former film aggressively male, the latter aggressively female. I’ve paired them because after viewing each I felt as though I had been placed under a spell. I’ve seen both more than twenty times, and every time I see something new. I don’t know how they did it, but have you ever watched something and felt like you were stuffed with drugs? This is Johnny Depp’s best performance, and Benicio Del Toro is a revelation. The physical embodiment of both these men . . . Bravo! And let’s not forget the always magic Giulietta Masina in one of her last collaborations with Fellini. She is absorbing and taut. Each of these films is a feat and a feast. An exercise in the grotesque."

"Ripe with tenor and trouble. The former film aggressively male, the latter aggressively female. I’ve paired them because after viewing each I felt as though I had been placed under a spell. I’ve seen both more than twenty times, and every time I see something new. I don’t know how they did it, but have you ever watched something and felt like you were stuffed with drugs? This is Johnny Depp’s best performance, and Benicio Del Toro is a revelation. The physical embodiment of both these men . . . Bravo! And let’s not forget the always magic Giulietta Masina in one of her last collaborations with Fellini. She is absorbing and taut. Each of these films is a feat and a feast. An exercise in the grotesque."