Category Ikon Designing

Yes, there are ridiculous dream sequences (or are they?!?!) involving pastoral reveries, swords, horses, Tommy guns and wizardsploitation, the kind that suggest profundity only if you’ve been using Physical Graffiti‘s gatefold for seed harvesting. But for years, this was the best live…

The word “live” in the movie title is a bit of a red herring when it comes to Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, since the only audience in the oldest surviving Roman amphitheater in the world is the film’s crew. But it’s also…

Two years after the landmark Lonely Boy brought cinema vérité techniques backstage, the Maysles Brothers hitched a ride with the Fab Four on their first trans-Atlantic trip. Although Richard Lester would (lightly) fictionalize similar scenarios in A Hard Day’s Night, no camera before or since…

Even if you’ve never seen Don’t Look Back, you know it by heart. The “Subterranean Homesick Blues” opener — nicked by everyone from INXS to Bob Roberts — is the most obvious cultural reference point, but in a larger sense this documentary of Bob Dylan’s…

When the Band decided to hang it up with one last show in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day 1976, they threw a wake rather than a funeral. Directed by Martin Scorsese right before he dove into Raging Bull, this concert film is, first…

What was Talking Heads’ strategy for their euphoric, propulsive 1984 concert film? “We didn’t want any of the bullshit,” drummer Chris Frantz told Rolling Stone. “We didn’t want the clichés.” Eschewing pandering audience shots and focusing instead on evocative lighting and imaginative set design,…

Impossibly beautiful, incredibly smart, surprisingly candid and fiendishly calculating, the Madonna of Truth or Dare is adept at soaking up every inch of the spotlight. Director Alek Keshishian’s documentary about the singer’s Blond Ambition Tour purports to offer a closer look at the…

You can never discount the importance to documentary filmmaking of being in the right place at the right time, and from June 16-18, 1967, that place was the Monterey County Fairgrounds. With his cameras roaming through the crowd in the hands…

If Metallica had a love of the absurd, you could accuse them of staging their sessions with band therapist Phil Towle as an attempt to make their own This Is Spinal Tap. But when Lars Ulrich starts fielding grievances from his longtime bandmates…