Back to Black
Focus Features | Release Date: May 17, 2024 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
43
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 45 Critic Reviews
Positive:
10
Mixed:
22
Negative:
13
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
90
Wall Street JournalKyle SmithMay 17, 2024
The film is detailed, vivid, enthralling—and necessarily full of pain. The performances are top-notch, led by Ms. Abela, who does her own singing in an amazing re-creation of Winehouse’s muscular soul vocals. Read full review
80
NMENick LevineApr 9, 2024
This film was always going to face accusations of being exploitative – given the way Winehouse was scrutinised when she was alive – but the naysayers needn’t have worried. Taylor-Johnson’s film (particularly the ending) is impressively deft and delicate. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawApr 9, 2024
Back to Black is essentially a gentle, forgiving film and there are other, tougher, bleaker ways to put Winehouse’s life on screen – but Abela conveys her tenderness, and perhaps most poignantly of all her youth, so tellingly at odds with that tough image and eerily mature voice. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleMay 15, 2024
Back to Black holds back from wallowing in Winehouse’s dysfunction. Instead, like an authorized biography, Back to Black chooses to be kind to everybody. It’s not the flashiest choice, but the world is big enough for one kind biopic. Winehouse deserved to get lucky, at least once. Read full review
75
Original-CinLiz BraunMay 15, 2024
This is perhaps a kinder, gentler Amy Winehouse story? Maybe so, but there’s no opportunity for emotional investment, despite Marisa Abela’s wonderful performance. It’s all a bit like seeing a good cover band. Read full review
70
Arizona RepublicEd MasleyMay 15, 2024
It glosses over any number of defining Winehouse moments. In the end, though, you do get a sense of who she was and why she was the way she was, and how that drove her to create such deeply soulful music. Read full review
70
VarietyOwen GleibermanApr 9, 2024
At its best, Back to Black, the forthright and compelling movie that’s been made of Winehouse’s life, takes that light/dark balance and digs into the drama of it, making it sing. Read full review
65
CNNBrian LowryMay 17, 2024
Thin as biopics go, the power of Abela’s portrayal elevates the film, providing a poignance and strength that’s the clearest motivation to go, go, go. Read full review
63
The Seattle TimesYasmeen WafaiMay 22, 2024
This isn’t a bright tale of Winehouse’s rise to stardom. It’s a tragic story of a once-in-a-generation talent gone too soon. Read full review
63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Johanna SchnellerMay 15, 2024
The tenderest thing Taylor-Johnson does in Back to Black is remind us how very young Winehouse was when she wowed the world. Read full review
60
We Got This CoveredFrancisca TinocoApr 15, 2024
There's a lot of compassion in 'Back to Black' for its troubled subject, but its best intentions become its worse mistakes when it fails to direct any semblance of a critical look at the multiple tragic events in Amy Winehouse's too-short life. Read full review
60
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeApr 10, 2024
Sure, you will learn more – and hear more of the original recordings – in Asif Kapadia’s great documentary Amy, but Taylor-Johnson does a decent job of making a tight drama from the same tragic yarn. Read full review
60
Total FilmJames MottramApr 9, 2024
A competent if occasionally clunky biopic, enlivened by a superb Marisa Abela, who truly inhabits Winehouse and brings those songs to life. Read full review
60
The TelegraphTim RobeyApr 9, 2024
By concentrating on the relationship, the road they’ve taken here is too narrow, but I’m sympathetic to the problem: sharpening your focus always gives biopics more lift-off than vaguely trying to cram everything in. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterLeslie FelperinApr 9, 2024
Back to Black is, like its heroine, flawed and fallible but frequently very affecting. Read full review
50
Movie NationRoger MooreMay 31, 2024
Like a lot of musical bio-pics, from maudlin Whitney Houston stories to the overrated Oscar winners “La Vie En Rose” and the much more fun “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the filmmakers limit us to “the greatest hits.” And that’s a far from complete or wholly satisfying immersion in this life and her world. Read full review
50
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliMay 21, 2024
My reaction is that I could learn a lot more about Winehouse by listening to her music than by watching this by-the-numbers sketch of her adult life. Read full review
50
Washington PostTy BurrMay 16, 2024
The new movie, in fact, has been made with the approval of the Winehouse family; coincidentally or not, “Back to Black” has the feeling of a whitewash. Read full review
50
Los Angeles TimesKatie WalshMay 16, 2024
With a visual style that is straightforward and serviceable at best and a frustratingly limited emotional range, Back to Black never captures the beauty of Winehouse’s talent, the heartbreak of her performances or the horror of her tragedy. Read full review
50
TheWrapWilliam BibbianiApr 9, 2024
Tells the story of Amy Winehouse but shows no passion in telling it and has nothing to say about the events that transpire. It’s the utter minimum of what a biopic can be. Read full review
50
Screen DailyJonathan RomneyApr 9, 2024
In Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Back To Black, Winehouse’s brief, brilliant life is essentially pared down to a tale of poisoned romance. Read full review
42
The Film StageAlistair RyderApr 24, 2024
Although the filmmakers say that Winehouse’s family didn’t interfere with the creative process, this watered-down interpretation of her troubles feels written with the intention of ruffling as few feathers as possible, pulling its punches when dramatizing the more harrowing moments in her life. Read full review
42
IndieWireVikram MurthiApr 10, 2024
The palpable sincerity behind “Back to Black” almost makes its myriad weaknesses more glaring. Everyone involved in the film approaches the late artist with love and respect, but its tawdry instincts and misguided sense of responsibility let her memory down. Read full review
40
Screen RantMae AbdulbakiMay 17, 2024
With the documentary Amy painting a more detailed and intimate portrait of the singer’s life, it’s hard to recommend such a stilted, unimaginative biopic that doesn’t do Winehouse any justice. Read full review
40
ABC NewsPeter TraversMay 17, 2024
While this sanitized and superficial Amy Winehouse biopic flounders around in search of focus, new star Marisa Abela gives her blazing all to capturing the late singer’s short, turbulent life and lasting art with stunning ferocity and feeling. Read full review
40
Paste MagazineJade GomezMay 16, 2024
Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Back to Black—her attempt at telling the taboo tale of one of music’s most tragic figures, Amy Winehouse—leans too much into the dark cloud looming over the singer’s sad demise, in turn fumbling what could’ve been a rare, successful dramatization of fame and addiction. Read full review
40
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerMay 16, 2024
Taking its title from her second and final critically-acclaimed blockbuster album, music biopic Back to Black gives you all those details you’ll recognize – but not much beyond that. Read full review
40
Vanity FairRichard LawsonMay 15, 2024
A movie like this—about such a fiery, singular person—should not play like mere misty elegy, a brief recounting of happy memories and sad ones that amounts to a sentimental sketch of an artist. Where is the whir of the world as Winehouse saw it, the matrix of pleasure and heartbreak that so fascinated her? Where is the Winehouse who, in the full glare of her being, ought to be remembered? Read full review
40
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeApr 15, 2024
There are moments when Abela disappears and Winehouse bursts on to the screen, like a magic eye picture blinked fleetingly into focus. But the film is wildly uneven and prone to catastrophic misjudgments – in that at least it’s true to Winehouse’s spirit. Read full review
40
Time OutPhil de SemlyenApr 10, 2024
Not all of these vignettes are duds – Amy’s meet-cute with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell, excellent) over pints and pool in a Camden boozer is genuinely terrific – but they don’t make a script that already feels soft-soaped to get the Winehouse’s estate’s approval, feel any less pedestrian. Read full review
40
EmpireHayley CampbellApr 9, 2024
A solid performance let down by a script that cherry-picks the facts and ultimately tells us less than we already know. Watch Asif Kapadia’s Amy instead. Read full review
40
The IndependentCharlotte O'SullivanApr 9, 2024
Back to Black is a fitfully enjoyable little package that will do wonders for the careers of Abela and O’Connell. But unlike Winehouse’s oeuvre, it’s not worth taking seriously. It’s just too afraid of the dark. Read full review
38
The Associated PressLindsey BahrMay 15, 2024
Was it attempting a freewheeling jazz form, or is it just messy? Read full review
38
Slant MagazineRoss McIndoeApr 13, 2024
The film presents Amy Winehouse’s demise with a sad shrug, as one of those tragic things that just sort of happens. Read full review
33
Entertainment WeeklyMaureen Lee LenkerMay 17, 2024
There’s no desire to interrogate her artistry or to grant a portrait of what made her tick. In this rendering, Winehouse is made up purely of audacity, vocal theatrics, and addiction-fueled behavior. When it comes to this surface-level exploitation of Amy Winehouse’s life, just say no, no, no. Read full review
33
The A.V. ClubBrogan MorrisMay 15, 2024
No film is “too soon” if it can excavate deeper truths or find a fresh angle on a familiar story. But Back To Black does neither. Read full review
30
Rolling StoneDavid FearMay 15, 2024
The movie may be so scared of being an Auto-Tuned biopic that it settles for simply being out of tune altogether. Read full review
25
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiMay 16, 2024
As expected, director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s woeful film “Back to Black” doesn’t play as the gripping battle of musical genius vs. personal demons it fancies itself to be. Instead it’s all sadness, songs and sensationalism. Read full review
25
ObserverLaura BabiakMay 15, 2024
More visualized Wikipedia article than movie, Back to Black covers a wide swath of Amy Winehouse’s life and career without any real depth. Read full review
20
The New York TimesAlissa WilkinsonJun 6, 2024
That a movie messes with the historical record a little doesn’t automatically make it bad. But in Back to Black the omissions feel downright weird, as if something is being ignored. Read full review
20
ColliderEmma KielyMay 17, 2024
The creatively (and morally) bankrupt and downright offensive biopic glosses over Amy Winehouse’s complicated, and ultimately, tragic life to shine a more flattering light on her father and ex-husband, distorting the real-life events in her life to tell its own narrative. Read full review
20
VoxKyndall CunninghamMay 17, 2024
With all of its missteps and murky intentions, Back to Black might just be the tipping point in a prevalent conversation about the function of musical biopics and what we should demand from them. Read full review
20
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreMay 16, 2024
It’s a film about Amy Winehouse that just doesn’t care for Amy Winehouse much, as an artist or as a person. Read full review
20
Little White LiesRogan GrahamApr 9, 2024
As much as the party line insists this film is a celebration of Amy’s musical genius, it is as salacious and cruel as any tabloid cutting from the noughties – only invested in the bloody ballet pump left in the street, not the complexities of living a very public life with addiction. Read full review
12
RogerEbert.comPeyton RobinsonMay 17, 2024
Taylor-Johnson’s film, penned by Matt Greenhalgh, is concerned with Amy the addict, making “Back to Black” a dreadful, dastardly attempt at a biopic. Read full review
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