Year of the Horse

This is an intimate, lyrical yet incendiary film, and it will please fans of both Young and Jarmusch, a filmmaker drawn to the intersection of American popular culture and a profound sense of loneliness. Read full review

It's a million miles from MTV chic; instead a timeless record of a timeless band, now fifty-somethings uniting an everyman/woman/child audience. Feel the power. Read full review

By getting out of the way as much as he does, Jarmusch makes Year of the Horse as much a statement about creative freedom as it is about music itself. [17 Oct 1997, p.F20]

Fans of Neil Young and Crazy Horse will doubtless revel in these lengthy concert scenes, and although occasionally the band's songs wander off into what appear to be impromptu jam sessions, Year of the Horse is never boring. Read full review

Year of the Horse is an appropriately edgy, ragged salute to a rock-and-roll band that refuses - happily - to say die. [31 Oct 1997, p.04]

If anything, the film drags a bit because the tour that Jarmusch chose to film, the 1996 effort, was following a Crazy Horse album that was, for them anyway, sub-par. But the interviews with the band members and the behind-the-scenes footage - as well as the vintage material - make for an entertaining and illuminating experience. Read full review

Jarmusch captures all this in Super 8 Hi Fi 8 video, which gives a gritty, dirty feeling. Maybe it's fake authentic, but it feels right. [24 Oct 1997, p.C8]

Fans of Young's rocking excursions with Crazy Horse -- as opposed to his more polished pop, folk and country-tinged work -- should have a gas at Year of the Horse. [17 Oct 1997, p.F]

There's too much feedback and some of the numbers are allowed to go on, Grateful Dead style, but the movie means to invoke a trance, and often it succeeds. [29 Oct 1997, p.C1]

Jim Jarmusch's underwhelming documentary on the veteran rock group Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Of course the music is fine; a robotic camera could capture that. But Jarmusch gets nothing out of his interview except the band members and manager repeatedly telling us how long and how well the group works together. Read full review

Jarmusch documented the group's 1996 tour and includes interviews as well as concert footage from 10 and 20 years ago. An admirer, he lets the songs go on and on into those trademark endless, nearly hallucinatory codas. The music is good. But the film Horse goes a little lame.

The focus is limited to Young's longtime Crazy Horse colleagues -- in other words, forget Buffalo Springfield or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young -- but even on this level, there's a lot of rambling and disinclination to answer questions. A substantial number of viewers will likely be ground down, and certainly there's nothing here to make Young's 1979 concert film, Rust Never Sleeps, an obsolete view. [07 Oct 1997, p.3D]

Bluntly put, Neil Young’s music now has too much integrity and not enough hooks, and so does Year of the Horse. The rough-grain Super-8 images, while a nifty visual correlative to the Crazy Horse sound, deny us the fundamental pleasure of a concert movie — a sense of intimacy with the band’s performance. Read full review

It's all shot in muddy earth tones, on grainy Super 8 film, Hi Fi 8 video and 16-mm. If you seek the origin of the grunge look, seek no further: Young, in his floppy plaid shirts and baggy shorts, looks like a shipwrecked lumberjack. His fellow band members, Billy Talbot, Poncho Sampedro and Ralph Molina, exude vibes that would strike terror into the heart of an unarmed convenience store clerk. Read full review