review – Chris Barsanti

*^{Elton John and John Lennon backstage at Madison Square Garden, 1974. (Sam Emerson)}*

The new documentary Elton John: Never Too Late just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. It should be coming relatively soon to Disney+.

My review ran at The Playlist:

The makers of “Elton John: Never Too Late” wisely didn’t try to be completists. After a half-century-plus of touring as well as recording approximately eleventy thousand albums and musicals, attempting a complete survey of Elton John’s output in one film is a fool’s errand. However, the film ends up covering enough of his career that the resulting gaps are more noticeable than they should be. Viewers will leave the movie with a good-enough appreciation of his work, but not necessarily any deeper an understanding of the man than could be gleaned from viewing “Rocketman“…

I reviewed the documentary Love in the Time of Fentanyl from DOC NYC for The Playlist:

Almost everything viewers need to know about the mortal consequences of the fentanyl epidemic portrayed in Colin Askey’s new Vancouver-set documentary “Love in the Time of Fentanyl” is contained in one exchange between two users. One man talks about how coming off heroin was hard but manageable, essentially Netflix and chilling in his apartment for a week—but detoxing from fentanyl? That led to the emergency room. Given that and the spread of fentanyl throughout the city’s illicit drug supply, it is easier to understand the argument for the safe-injection site which the film documents. At the same time, seeing that site as anything but a Band-Aid on a grievous wound is hard…

It should be playing later this year on PBS’s Independent Lens.

Here’s the trailer:

Chris Barsanti

Tag: review

Screening Room: ‘Elton John: Never Too Late’

Screening Room: ‘Love in the Time of Fentanyl’