Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
A concert film documenting Talking Heads at the height of their popularity, on tour for their 1983 album "Speaking in Tongues." The band takes the stage one by one and is joined by a cadre of guest musicians for a career-spanning and cinematic performance that features creative choreography and visuals.
Stop Making Sense is widely considered the greatest concert film ever made. Jonathan Demme's direction and Jordan Cronenweth's cinematography elevate it far beyond typical concert documentation — the staging, lighting, and editing are genuinely cinematic. David Byrne's performance and the band's escalating energy are electrifying and unrepeatable. Novelty is high because the film essentially redefined what a concert film could be, with its theatrical conceit of building the band piece by piece and Byrne's iconic big suit. Plot scores low as it is structurally a concert with minimal narrative arc. The ending, while energetic, doesn't deliver a particularly resonant close compared to the peaks mid-show.