When You're Strange offers a worshipful but insightful portrait of the group...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 6, 2010

This is a far better bet than Oliver Stone's ghastly Doors movie.

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

The cumulative effect of this film is to enhance one's respect for The Doors (John Densmore, Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarek) and to diminish the same for Morrison, whose posturing now looks like the most fatuous exhibitionism.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 2, 2010

Director Tom DiCillo is relatively incurious about the bands' mundane professional and romantic lives, perhaps for fear of importing an injurious Spinal Tap irony. But his film material of Jim Morrison is sensational.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 1, 2010

While the old adage says those who remember the '60s weren't really there, When You're Strange resurrects the spirit of the decade in a way that is at once intimate and universally familiar.

Full Review | Jul 1, 2010

Those who will learn something from it can have no interest whatsoever in The Doors. This leaves its intended audience somewhat unclear.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 30, 2010

Essential for Doors fans, but enlightening to the uninitiated. A tantalising study of a troubled creator whose charisma still borders on the supernatural. Great music, too.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 30, 2010

Although Doors fans will drool over the prospect of the previously unseen footage, they are unlikely to find anything new here.

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

The vitality of crazed angel Jim Morrison is its driving force.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 6, 2010

[A] muddled, pretentious assemblage of film clips of the band shot between 1966 and 1971, with solemn narration by Johnny Depp.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 9, 2010

Seeing Morrison blithely hang a lei over the neck of an obviously giddy young woman or watching as Manzarek patiently fields questions helps humanize a group of men all too often shrouded in the mists of legend.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 9, 2010

A sometimes insightful, sometimes absurdly devotional but steadily engaging film.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 9, 2010

When You're Strange offers a mesmerizing, behind-the-music glimpse at a crucial and bizarre moment in rock history, and maybe in American cultural history, period.

Full Review | Apr 8, 2010

When You're Strange is a remedial Doors class, taught by a professor who sounds as if he's doing voiceovers for car commercials.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Apr 8, 2010

Of little interest to anyone beyond hard-core Doors fans hungry for any previously unreleased film or audio content.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 8, 2010

Writer/director Tom DiCillo goes a bit overboard with his rhetoric, describing Morrison as "like an ancient shaman." Johnny Depp's measured narration brings DiCillo's often worshipful words back to earth.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 8, 2010

In hindsight (and on paper) it all seems old hat, but with savvy editing of intense footage, DiCillo puts us there, onstage, backstage, in the studio, and we're as intoxicated as Morrison's audience. Almost.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 8, 2010

Unhappy with what Oliver Stone did to Jim Morrison and the Doors in his 1991 biopic? Here's the doc for you.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 8, 2010

DiCillo approaches this nonfiction project with the glazed eyes of a true fan. He has the participation of surviving band members and a lot of rare, mesmerizing footage at his disposal ... What he doesn't have is critical distance or anything new to say.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 8, 2010

Director Tom DiCillo does his damnedest to make his documentary about The Doors unwatchable, but the subject matter is too compelling -- and the vintage footage too electrifying -- to be completely worthless.

| Original Score: C- | Apr 8, 2010