Noah Thompson’s review published on Letterboxd:
JAMES BROWN
Somehow one of the few people I know who loves Talking Heads as much as me hadn't seen this until now, so that needed to be remedied immediately. I'm gonna post it both on here and Twitter down the line, for fun I put together a personal Sight & Sound list for the ten movies I would pick for an actual list if I was polled for that. I did that awhile ago, and I did not include Stop Making Sense on that list, and I'm not going to change my list just based on whatever random personal accountability I have in my head. That said, it's likely that this would have slipped in there if I made that list now. A perfect movie, the only way I could see someone not liking this is if they really do not like Talking Heads for whatever reason, but even then, I think this thing is so damn good that it would make just about anyone a true believer in these guys at least for its runtime. David Byrne has no bones, and he's the man who the term "Go, white boy, go!" was invented for. I think something that's underrated when talking about this movie and really the band as a whole is that, as prominent of a force as Byrne is as a musician and as a screen presence, he's only a singular part of this well-oiled machine. The traditional members of Talking Heads, the lookalike dancers with Byrne, and the additional guys who play the synthesizer, bass, and bongos are all phenomenal in their own right. Every person onstage has at least one moment where the spotlight is on them, and they make whatever moments they have explode in front of the camera. No movie I've seen, fictional or not, has this level of energy to it at all times. It's so fun and a work of overwhelmingly gorgeous art. If the "This Must Be the Place" sequence makes you cry, you're only human.
10/10
