SHINE A LIGHT Opens 58th Berlin Film Festival

Top: The Director and the Rolling Stones: Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger, Ron Wood
Bottom: Jack White, Mick Jagger

Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones concert movie, Shine a Light, opened the 58th Berlin Film Festival this evening.

"Raunchy and affectionate," writes Lee Marshall in Screen Daily, "Scorsese's Rolling Stones film [...] is as much homage as concert film. In bringing the miracle of the Stones' survival to a wider audience, it's the cinematic equivalent of an all-singing, all-dancing Tutankhamun exhibition. And for all its delight this is one of the limitations of what is nevertheless a lively, likeable, hip-shaking two-hour rockfest. Every concert film needs to tell a story, and in choosing the narrative of miraculous preservation, coupled with a technically flawless but often surprisingly conventional shooting style, Scorsese inevitably forfeits some of the rawness of the straight-up live rock movie."

Shine a Light, which opens in the US on April 4, is composed of bits and pieces from two Stones concerts held at New York's historic Beacon Theatre in the autumn of 2006, one of which was a charity benefit tied to former US president Bill Clinton's 60th birthday party. (Mick Jagger initially wanted Scorsese to film the Stones' Rio de Janeiro beach concert, but the director, as reported in the Associated Press, wanted "something much more intimate.")

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