Back to Black

2hrs 2mins (15)

Glossy Amy Winehouse biopic directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson ★★★

Sam Taylor-Johnson has made “what’s easily her best work so far” with this “warm, heartfelt dramatisation” of the life of Amy Winehouse, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Starring Marisa Abela, it focuses on the late singer’s troubled relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), who comes across here as “a lot more sympathetic and less rodenty” than he did in real life. In a “lovely, if faintly sucrose scene”, we watch them meet at The Good Mixer pub in Camden, where Blake seems “airily unfazed” by Amy’s fame, and she, entranced by his cool charisma, challenges him to a game of pool. The film is also kind to Amy’s taxi driver father Mitch (Eddie Marsan), who managed her career, and who has been accused of milking her success. There are “tougher, bleaker ways to put Winehouse’s life on screen” – but Abela “conveys her tenderness, and perhaps most poignantly of all her youth”, which is so at odds with that tough image and “eerily mature voice”.

The “schtick being rolled out” for this dud is that it’s an “impressionistic” take on Winehouse’s life, said Hamish MacBain in the Evening Standard. As such, it “doesn’t bother” to establish how she became so famous; nor does it even explore the roots of her addictions. As for its portrayal of Fielder-Civil: “Wow. Just wow.” He may have been “over-vilified”, but this is “Saint Blake: The Movie”. The film shies so far away from “the ugly stuff”, it looks at times like a perfume ad, said Peter Hoskin in the Daily Mail. And though Abela tries to recreate her subject’s look and voice, this “90% facsimile just draws attention to the missing 10%: the wayward genius of the original artist”. Much better to listen to Back to Black “and remember what really made Winehouse a star”.