An inspired detective-like piecing-together of a painful, chronologically shredded historical trajectory that might have been too ambitious (or impossible) to cover without the cleverly devised bebop shortcuts.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 24, 2025

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’s stylish use of memoirs by people who were there, as well as copious archival footage, seeks to tame the sprawling Congo Crisis.

| Mar 27, 2025

[Johan Grimonprez] establishes a powerful tension here where the artistic becomes an uncomfortable ally of power, investigating its own capacity for influence. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 10, 2025

With its complex mapping of information, this is a far less passive viewing experience than most popular historical documentaries, but that's by design: the issues are difficult and Grimonprez, admirably, refuses to reduce them to pat summaries.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 4, 2025

With artful editing, this mostly archival documentary tells how the independence of Congo, competition for resources, and political exploitation of American jazz stars intertwined and resulted in the 1961 assassination of Congo leader Patrice Lumumba.

| Mar 2, 2025

Soundtrack for a Coup d'Etat is an intricate and gripping collage of images, jazz and historical quotes around the fruitless dream of an African continent free from foreign greed and plunder. [Full review in Spanish]

| Feb 28, 2025

Soundtrack is one of the most engaging films I’ve seen in many years—my attention was held from beginning to end.

| Feb 12, 2025

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat is a movie that should be watched by everyone, whether to understand art or to understand the backbone of our political and economic system.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Feb 11, 2025

Historical documentary on jazz great Louis Armstrong.

| Original Score: B | Jan 24, 2025

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a dense and meticulously constructed picture.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 21, 2025

This is a very ambitious film that throws a lot of ideas at the viewer. It doesn't succeed in being a compelling or entertaining narrative, but it is impressive as a research project bundled in a novel multimedia package.

| Original Score: C | Jan 16, 2025

...one of the most profound, comprehensive and shocking documentaries of recent times. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 15, 2025

It’s rollicking and energetic, and will sweep you up and keep you in its grip even when it begins to feel like too much packed into too small a space.

| Jan 14, 2025

Grimonprez has tapped into an incredible intersection of time, place and players that he turns into an immersive experience that entertains and informs unlike any Wikipedia page or history book.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 10, 2025

Not everyone may be into a two-and-a-half-hour video essay focused on an assassination and how jazz plays a role, but I was enthralled.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jan 8, 2025

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat relates not just Lumumba’s assassination but the larger role the Congo, a nation rich with natural resources, played in the Cold War, and the so-called Congo Crisis’ surprising intersections with midcentury American jazz.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 7, 2025

Exhilarating.

| Dec 31, 2024

"Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat" is one of 2024's very best documentaries, not only in substance but in its revolutionary form.

| Original Score: A | Dec 26, 2024

The fierce creative instincts of Grimonprez and company ensure Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat’s resonates so vigorously.

| Dec 20, 2024

That the film answers "why?" [its titular coup occurred] both historically...and contemporarily...pushes it beyond a brilliantly constructed piece of historical documentation into meaningful agitprop for today.

| Dec 17, 2024