Female Film Critics 24/375
Amy Winehouse’s music was raw and real, full of pain and rage. She was as wild and as wise as her music; she exuded a feral sexual energy and embodied all the anger of smart, ambitious, talented women in a world that wants only to corral and commodify them. The tepid, perfunctory Back to Black fails to capture her unclassifiable, irrepressible messiness.
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Director Sam Taylor-Johnson and star Marisa Abela try their best to help us smile for Amy Winehouse. And it works, in the new musical, drama biopic Back to Black. While the 2015 Oscar winning documentary, Amy, was raw and revealing,Back to Black, named after Winehouse’s last album, is a sympathetic view of the tortured torch singer. The film follows Amy from 18 years old and dreaming of a career as a singer like her beloved grandmother to just before her death from alcohol poisoning in 2011 at the age of 27 and on the verge of superstardom.
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Focus Features will release “Back to Black,” the anticipated biopic of the late Grammy winner Amy Winehouse, in U.S. theaters on May 10. Back to Black is directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson from a script written by Matt Greenhalgh, following their successful collaboration on Nowhere Boy in 2009. Back to Black is billed as a never-before-seen glimpse into Winehouse’s early rise to fame and the release of her groundbreaking studio album “Back to Black.” Told from the singer-songwriter’s perspective, the film is meant to be “an unapologetic look at the woman behind the phenomenon and the relationship that inspired one of the most legendary albums of all time.”
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