Amy – 8

An awfully good documentary about Amy Winehouse on several levels. It captured her art. It captured her tortured personal life. Other than her mother, it showed us all the important people around her, bad and good. It told her story, pretty much from beginning to end. Going in, I knew her name. Leaving, I felt I knew her. What made the documentary exceptional was the access the director had to intimate moments, home movies, family and friends as well as clips of the public persona, so we could see what was going on behind the scene. And then there was the paparazzi effect: as we watched, we scorned the ruthless cameramen who made her life hell while taking in their pictures ourselves. We are not as bad as Jay Leno, cracking jokes about Amy’s drug dependency, but the movie feeds us this story, and we eat it up.