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

| Oct 4, 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

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

If the film made famous a few key props — huge suit, floor lamp — what glues you to him [David Byrne] are the characters he passes through song by song while always essentially himself.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 21, 2023

The drama that Demme evokes in “Stop Making Sense” is the artistic self-transcendence that emerges from collaboration in performance.

| Sep 20, 2023

We see the crew moving set pieces on stage, and we watch as a world is created, one in which people find giddy joy in making music together.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 19, 2023

As wonderful as all this new techonology is, it would be nothing without Demme's simple framing, the band's musical intensity and Byrne's lanky, restless cool. Those were the film's strengths 40 years ago and they remain so today.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 18, 2023

In its own terms Stop Making Sense is close to perfection.

| Sep 13, 2023

The movie? It’s still great and it sounds fantastic. The band? Well, you can’t go back to CBGBs anymore.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 12, 2023

Talking Heads made for great material, with its revolutionary mash-up of punk, funk, art, avant-garde and other sounds. But what sets "Stop" apart is the intimate look at that brilliant talking head, lead singer David Byrne.

| Jul 16, 2020

Truly captivating entertainment.

| Jul 16, 2020

It's a treat for fans (Heads heads?), and a chance for the uninitiated to tune in to the band that has come to personify postmodernist rock 'n' roll.

| Jan 2, 2018

Stop Making Sense is a concert film with a narrative, bursting at the seams with bits of invention and passion.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 22, 2009

A quietly large achievement.

| Feb 9, 2006

The overwhelming impression throughout Stop Making Sense is of enormous energy, of life being lived at a joyous high.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 23, 2004

Mr. Demme has captured both the look and the spirit of this live performance with a daring and precision that match the group's own.

| May 20, 2003

Stop Making Sense successfully captures almost everything that was great about the Talking Heads, and there's no better endorsement of a concert film than that.

| Mar 10, 2003

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 30, 2001