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Glastonbury
Metascore
60 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 13 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9 out of 13
  2. Mixed: 2 out of 13
  3. Negative: 2 out of 13
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  1. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: Bill White
    83
    Captures the open-air rock festival experience more completely than any previous film of its kind.
  2. Film Threat
    Reviewed by: Pete Vonder Haar
    80
    The festival's audience is as integral a part of the proceedings as the music, and we get a rich portrait of the wide variety of pranksters, iconoclasts, and freaks that descend upon the West Country of England in the hundreds of thousands every year. Glastonbury offers an exhaustive look at what remains the largest event of its kind.
  3. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marc Savlov
    78
    The hippies, the ravers, the bumbling bobbies and nonplussed locals, the mud, the rush of being in the crush, up against the barricades, torn between the need for a restroom and the need for more room, to dance, to sing, to carry on like a stark loony regardless of your faraway day job – all of this is captured by Temple's unblinking, seemingly everywhere-at-once eye.
  4. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Michael Wilmington
    75
    Best of all though, we get to experience the whole fest itself, over four turbulent decades-an era from which Glastonbury, like Woodstock in its day, offers a halcyon "timeout."
  5. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Joel Selvin
    75
    Full of vitality and music and, at the same time, is a little wobbly, meandering and too long.
  6. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Keith Phipps
    75
    The film is clearly an act of boosterism, and it makes a pretty good case for the Glastonbury cause.
  7. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kevin Crust
    70
    The film does a fairly remarkable job of capturing the attitude of the festival, covering its evolution from quaint little Woodstock knockoff into something much larger that is both hallucinatory and hypnotic. It's Mardi Gras meets Burning Man with an excellent, revolving house band.
  8. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Ann Hornaday
    70
    Clocking in at two hours-plus, Glastonbury at times gives viewers the impression that they're slogging through the three-day plunge into mud, music and madness themselves. But for all the posers with light sticks and piercings, there are moments of Dada-esque beauty, not to mention some great music.
  9. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Ty Burr
    63
    As with most rock festivals, you had to be there, and if you're British you probably were, one year or another. In that case, Glastonbury is a pointed but essentially nostalgic tour of one country's more noble pop impulses. Otherwise, it's as muddy as Yasgur's farm back in the day.
  10. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Ray Bennett
    50
    A performance film, but sadly the majority of the performers are not the acts that have played at the long-running pop festival over 35 years, but the exhibitionists who make up the crowd.
  11. Variety
    Reviewed by: Dennis Harvey
    50
    While one can appreciate helmer's resistance to a conventional, chronological overview, what emerges is a long, structureless muddle that does justice to neither the stellar acts nor changing countercultural times event has encompassed.
  12. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: J.R. Jones
    30
    Despite the 138-minute running time, Temple holds all the artists to one song (or less), devoting about half the movie to kaleidoscopic--and ultimately wearying--montage of festivalgoers past and present.
  13. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Rob Nelson
    20
    Pretentiously impressionistic, sloppy almost to the point of self-parody, Temple's film is New Journalism without the journalism -- or, alas, the drugs.
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