Back to Black

Back to Black

The extraordinary story of Amy Winehouse’s early rise to fame from her early days in Camden through the making of her groundbreaking album, Back to Black that catapulted Winehouse to global fame. Told through Amy’s eyes and inspired by her deeply personal lyrics, the film explores and embraces the many layers of the iconic artist and the tumultuous love story at the center of one of the most legendary albums of all time.

  • Released:
  • Runtime: 122 minutes
  • Genre: Drama, Music
  • Stars: Marisa Abela, Lesley Manville, Eddie Marsan, Jack O'Connell, Juliet Cowan, Bronson Webb, Ansu Kabia, Harley Bird, Michael S. Siegel, Matilda Thorpe, Jeff Tunke, Ryan O'Doherty, Izaak Cainer, Tracey Lushington, Sam Buchanan
  • Director: Sam Taylor-Johnson
 Comments
  • MovieBuff5454 - 3 July 2024
    It Is Hard to Watch a Life Spin Out of Control: Yet Truth is Truth
    Amy Winehouse has been my favorite singer for many years. I followed her career and private life and have pretty much worked out the sensationalism and separated it from the truth. And the truth is not pretty. This film does a masterful job of telling us about her life and what led to her eventual death. The actors capture the essence of their real-life counterparts, whether it is difficult to watch or not. And, sometimes it make us not especially like the characters. That's life. By the way, I've developed a crush on the actor who plays the character of Chris (Ryan O'Doherty). I hope we see him in more project.s.
  • Lejink - 15 June 2024
    Understanding Amy
    Sam Taylor-Johnson's film on the life of Amy Winehouse is the antithesis of other recent high-profile pop-star biopics such as those on Elton John and Freddie Mercury. There's very little glitz and glamour in her movie, which I guess accords with the artist's own "take me as you find me" outlook.

    The narrative stresses the key relationships in her short life, those with her amateur crooner father, her nan, who as a former jazz-singer was the real deal and proved to be Amy's main musical inspiration but who sadly died at the height of her granddaughter's fame and lastly of course her mutually self-destructive short-lived marriage to Blake Fielder-Civil, a self-confessed cocaine addict even at the time they met.

    The undoubted physical chemistry between the two is apparent but I felt the film didn't really dig deep enough into their relationship to explain just why they couldn't make it together. There are undoubtedly mitigating factors on the road to the singer's accidental early death adding her name to the jinxed list of talented artists who departed the earth at only 27, a roll-call including the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Janis Joplin amongst others and it's perhaps the similarly alcoholic and temperamental Joplin whose story Winehouse sadly resembles. Said factors are presented as the afore-mentioned death of her nan, but also her alcoholism, the constant invasion of her privacy by the gutter-press almost willing her on in her downward spiral and also her unfulfilled wish to have children of her own, this latter issue, perhaps too clunkily put across in a chance encounter Amy has with a young fan in a corner shop

    Marisa Abela convincingly portrays Amy, realistically capturing her sometimes down-at-heel appearance, her disarming, occasionally foul-mouthed candour (it's no surprise her debut album was called "Frank"), her sexual voraciousness, especially around Fielder-Civil but also her constantly on-the-edge lifestyle which ended when she apparently drank herself to death alone in her London house. She's also excellent at capturing Winehouse's charismatic live persona as well as her individualistic singing style. There's good support for her too with Jack O'Connell as the unrepentant Fielder-Civil, Lesley Manville as her devoted nan Cynthia and Eddie Marson as her long-suffering dad.

    There were one or two overripe exchanges of dialogue like when Amy puts off her dad's plan to get her into rehab by saying "Music is my rehab" and I was surprised by the omission of her co-producer Mark Ronson who I understand was the one who pointed Any to the wonderful Shangri-Las as the main reference point for the "Back to Black" album.

    Making effective use of actual locations in and around London in particular, I rate this a fine movie tribute to a mercurial talent who sadly wasn't in it for the long run.