Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
“If you’re going to see Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, make sure you see it with a packed house of grade school–aged girls,” said Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post. The hit concert film, which fell short of the loftiest box office prognostications on its debut weekend but still logged the second- highest October opening in U.S. movie history, is best experienced with a crowd of costumed young Swifties primed to dance, scream, and rush the screen, turning each showing into a “delirious, dizzying celebration of Swift mania.” The film itself “wisely keeps things simple,” but it provides an “impressively immersive” experience that documents the Swift concert performance that has been packing stadiums all year. You could complain about the overabundance of quick edits, said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. But as the 33-yearold singer-songwriter retraces her 17-year career by revisiting one album at a time, her command of her audience is “so complete that she instantaneously airbrushes every questionable filmmaking decision into oblivion.” For 2 hours and 48 minutes, she’s the “irresistibly” shiny, shimmering object before us, and “we’re the gawping trout, dazzled to the point of transcendence.” To match the passion and power of Swift’s songwriting and performance “would require a much better movie,” said Richard Brody in The New Yorker. But this frenetic, conventional document will do. Its “prime virtue” is that it concentrates viewers’ attention on her music, revealing the way she has turned her own spotlighted coming of age into “a form of naturalistic legend in which her audience of girls and young women find their own experiences taken seriously, as they deserve to be.”