Shine a Light

Shine a Light

Directed by Martin Scorsese

(PG-13)

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Martin Scorsese turns his camera on the Rolling Stones.

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Martin Scorsese has made a conventional concert film, but one of “uncommonly intimate proportions,” said Scott Foundas in the L.A. Weekly. Filmed in 2006, Shine a Light finds the Rolling Stones in their element: center stage at New York’s Beacon Theater during their “A Bigger Bang” tour. The rockumentary is neither as sweeping as Scorsese’s account of Bob Dylan in No Direction Home nor as momentous as his footage of the Band’s final performance in The Last Waltz. But like those classics, it is a product of “one great artist (Scorsese) trying to figure out what makes another (the Stones) tick.” Scorsese stays on the outside, letting his “Marvel Comics–worthy assemblage of super-cinematographers” examine the band from every conceivable angle, said David Edelstein in New York. Trying to follow every shimmy and shake of Mick Jagger’s Sweating to the Oldies workout would cause a person to “spontaneously combust.” The cameras aren’t exactly kind to these crater-faced rockers, said Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News. But the Stones prove “they can still rip this joint.”