Above all, the film is downright fun: a showcase for nine talented musicians enjoying themselves on stage, and itself an immersive expression of creative joy.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 6, 2024

Stop Making Sense is all killer, no filler.

| May 3, 2024

One of the best concert films in history in the cinema. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 7, 2024

Stop Making Sense is probably the most famous of all concert-based documentaries – its unfiltered, boundless joy has prompted the footage to enter history ahead of any other similar concerts recorded at the time.

| Dec 8, 2023

Stop Making Sense is the ultimate concert movie, and remains an essential text for the form as well as a perfect document of the joy to be found in the Talking Heads music

| Nov 22, 2023

Widely regarded as the greatest concert movie ever made, this irresistibly uplifting chronicle of a Talking Heads show from 1983 has lost none of its famed ability to move you as it gets you moving.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Nov 1, 2023

It’s the greatest concert film ever made, a Jonathan Demme masterpiece capturing Talking Heads at the peak of its powers in 1984.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 6, 2023

One of the greatest rock concert films.

| Original Score: A | Oct 5, 2023

Stop Making Sense remains one of the most supremely satisfying concert movies ever made.

| Oct 5, 2023

A rock orgy of volcanic power, this basically changed our perception of what we could reasonably expect from a concert movie.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 4, 2023

Bring the lights down, and it's just like a [live] performance. I promise you.

| Oct 4, 2023

Demme’s camera seems to work its way into the flow of the concert; it’s as though we understand it from inside.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 29, 2023

It’s been four decades since those Stop Making Sense concerts took place, and yet the audience at my screening applauded at the conclusion of “Burning Down the House.”

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 28, 2023

Originally filmed over four nights, the results are a terrific piece of filmmaking that finds all the right ways to show a performance that begins as minimalist as possible and expands into something truly joyous, as well as weird, funky, and very fun.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Sep 27, 2023

Its existence is a grace... The simmering, then explosive beauty [lies] in its steady accumulation of bits and pieces, looks and glances. Building a set, assembling a sound: The construction of the equipment onstage: sweet, kooky algebra.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Sep 26, 2023

Everyone plays out of their skin but Byrne is the inspired star, hitting himself in the face, doing laps of the stage and reappearing for Girlfriend Is Better in his famous giant suit.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 25, 2023

It’s difficult to watch Stop Making Sense and not have a great, engrossing time, a fact that’s as true now as it was in 1984. With the benefit of hindsight, it may even be more so.

| Sep 22, 2023

The movie is the finest imaginable version of the Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues tour. The concert’s physical staging elements, introduced in pieces and segments, with elegant and wryly suggestive words, create an aura of pristine unease.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 22, 2023

The pleasure of the music is overpowering.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 22, 2023

It’s a wonderful snapshot of a band in perfect unison, years before they would bitterly part ways.

| Sep 21, 2023