60
Metascore
13 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 80Film ThreatPete Vonder HaarFilm ThreatPete Vonder HaarThe festival's audience is as integral a part of the proceedings as the music, and we get a rich portrait of the wide variety of pranksters, iconoclasts, and freaks that descend upon the West Country of England in the hundreds of thousands every year. Glastonbury offers an exhaustive look at what remains the largest event of its kind.
- 75The A.V. ClubKeith PhippsThe A.V. ClubKeith PhippsThe film is clearly an act of boosterism, and it makes a pretty good case for the Glastonbury cause.
- 75San Francisco ChronicleSan Francisco ChronicleFull of vitality and music and, at the same time, is a little wobbly, meandering and too long.
- 75Chicago TribuneMichael WilmingtonChicago TribuneMichael WilmingtonBest of all though, we get to experience the whole fest itself, over four turbulent decades-an era from which Glastonbury, like Woodstock in its day, offers a halcyon "timeout."
- 70Los Angeles TimesKevin CrustLos Angeles TimesKevin CrustThe film does a fairly remarkable job of capturing the attitude of the festival, covering its evolution from quaint little Woodstock knockoff into something much larger that is both hallucinatory and hypnotic. It's Mardi Gras meets Burning Man with an excellent, revolving house band.
- 70Washington PostAnn HornadayWashington PostAnn HornadayClocking in at two hours-plus, Glastonbury at times gives viewers the impression that they're slogging through the three-day plunge into mud, music and madness themselves. But for all the posers with light sticks and piercings, there are moments of Dada-esque beauty, not to mention some great music.
- 50The Hollywood ReporterRay BennettThe Hollywood ReporterRay BennettA performance film, but sadly the majority of the performers are not the acts that have played at the long-running pop festival over 35 years, but the exhibitionists who make up the crowd.
- 50VarietyDennis HarveyVarietyDennis HarveyWhile one can appreciate helmer's resistance to a conventional, chronological overview, what emerges is a long, structureless muddle that does justice to neither the stellar acts nor changing countercultural times event has encompassed.
- 30Chicago ReaderJ.R. JonesChicago ReaderJ.R. JonesDespite the 138-minute running time, Temple holds all the artists to one song (or less), devoting about half the movie to kaleidoscopic--and ultimately wearying--montage of festivalgoers past and present.
- 20L.A. WeeklyL.A. WeeklyPretentiously impressionistic, sloppy almost to the point of self-parody, Temple’s film is New Journalism without the journalism -- or, alas, the drugs.