- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
89You can't help but feel conflicted watching this superb documentary about the seminal New York-based punk rock vanguard, the Ramones.
-
88Unearths the expected footage from the crypt -- including a hilarious live video of the band arguing onstage over what to play next. The anecdotes are pungent and revelatory.
-
83A documentary that digs deep inside this most revolutionary and tortured of punk quartets, it's hard not to feel that the Ramones, who never had a hit record, were the greatest band in 50 years to be stonewalled out of success.
-
83If you feel, like me, kinship with this essential building block of music, you owe it to yourself -- and to the Ramones -- to see this film.
-
80A gripping insight into the problems faced by men trying to sustain interest in playing the music of their youth.
-
Johnny's analysis and will carry the film. Of course they didn't get along--they were a rock group.
-
80At the picture’s best, it recalls Michael Winterbottom's "24 Hour Party People" in its tribute to the music of the times and the way in which that music provided a voice to a generation of social misfits.
-
The interviews with band members, managers, friends and peer fans confirm not only how influential, but how beloved the Ramones were.
-
80Genuinely sad: few bands have burst onto the scene with such a perfectly realized look, sound, and philosophy or been more trapped by their own meatheaded genius.
-
Much to their credit, filmmakers Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields leave almost all the talking to band members and their inner circle. That gives this documentary--their first film--a brisk authority, humor and directness true to the band's scrappy story.
-
75While serving up music so free of thought that the best of it seems to crystallize our thoughtless, tightly wound era.
-
75A thorough, gutsy and appropriately scuzzy-looking documentary.
-
75A true fan's nirvana.
-
75Offers a fascinating chronicle of the birth, glory days and waning years of a motorcycle-jacketed, bowl-haircutted quartet of middle-class geeks who unwittingly spawned the punk movement.
-
Details the group's raucous history with humor and a minimum of hero worship.
-
It makes for a compelling story and some thrilling music.
-
The first half of the film is a by-the-numbers rock docu. But at the halfway mark, the personalities and psychoses of the performers become as interesting as the history, and the documentary morphs into an involving human drama.
-
70Though occasionally repetitive, Gramaglia and Fields' admirably evenhanded documentary gives the Ramones the respect they deserve: Fans will be grateful and the uninitiated should listen and learn.
-
70While End of the Century feels a bit straggly toward the end (the rise of the Ramones is exhilarating; their slow, unfair demise is a downer), and its chronology is sometimes a little vague, the movie captures the spirit of both the band and the era they helped shape.
-
70It does pry much deeper into the band’s unexpectedly complex and contradictory personalities.
-
70As for the unfortunates who aren't already in love with The Ramones, End Of The Century should give them a better understanding of what they've been missing, and leave them wondering why they've missed out on it for so long.
-
70What the books suggest, the movie reveals and revels in--the songs, in other words, those brilliant, backbreakingly fast anthems.
-
70An engaging and emotional documentary.
-
70As End of the Century reveals even more starkly than the recent Metallica documentary, "Some Kind of Monster," harmony among band members becomes harder to sustain as the years gather, youthful enthusiasm wanes, and personalities define themselves.
-
A 108-minute film of a two-minute song.
prev
next
Page:
- 1
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 3 out of 3
-
Mixed: 0 out of 3
-
Negative: 0 out of 3
-
RobB.9