Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 18, 2011

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 17, 2011

The images combine with Cobain's voiceover for a cumulative effect that seeps into the film rather than exploding onto it.

| Apr 28, 2011

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 4, 2011

Filmmaker AJ Schnack uses 25-hours of previously unheard audio interviews with Cobain as voice over for footage of Cobain haunts. The images are mesmerizing, but Cobain never appears on screen, and he is missed.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 6, 2010

As an illustrated audio tour through the life of a gifted but self-destructive performer, 'About a Son' is enlightening to a point, but one has to wonder when filmmakers will stop exhuming the corpse of a man who desperately craved privacy.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 9, 2008

AJ Schnack's Kurt Cobain: About a Son is as gripping and revealing as Gus Van Sant's Last Days was hollow and pointless.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 1, 2008

Shaped from Cobain's own words, the film tells his story with care, in inventive style and without phony reverence or pretentious pronouncements.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 22, 2008

Most of the material has never been made public before, so the movie is a must-see for Cobain fans. Even for non-fans, it is quite an astonishing document. Up to a point.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 18, 2008

Only loosely connected to the story, the visuals quickly grow monotonous.

| Jan 11, 2008

Allows the fans that the legendary musician will keep gathering for decades to come a brief look inside Cobain's troubled mind, and it does so in a refreshingly bold and innovative way.

| Jan 11, 2008

A fascinating plunge into one man's thicket of contradictions.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 10, 2008

There is much to fault in this tedious exercise in pseudo-hipster cool masquerading as, well, what exactly?

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 4, 2008

Startlingly de-mythologizing at first, then just plain poignant . . . it's fascinating to reconcile Cobain's slacker howl over chipping guitar chords with a sodden Pacific Northwest of logging trucks and fishing boats.

Full Review | Dec 6, 2007

The ending section, where Schnack and Azerrad let Cobain ramble philosophically about life and music, is a muddled intellectual mess.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Nov 30, 2007

Many of the images aren't particularly compelling and neither, frankly, are Cobain's comments, which range from dull anti-press diatribes to familiar stories about the musical influence of his Aunt Mary to inarticulate blather.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 30, 2007

It's easy to get lost in his words, especially if you're a fan. I ended up enjoying the film overall, even if I had to wonder whether Cobain himself would have approved of a film like this.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 29, 2007

Cobain narrates the tale of his all-too-short life, musing on his successes, loves, letdowns, motivations and depression.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 29, 2007

Kurt Cobain About a Son is a lovely piece of filmmaking, a gripping, minimalist marriage of sound and image.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 2, 2007

The unique style of the film makes it a music and art house fan's must and, if you are a fan of Kurt Cobain, yours too.

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 28, 2007