Surprisingly concise but still well rounded, Zappa is the best doco of this under-appreciated talent that we’re likely to get.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 3, 2023

The style does bring a flamboyancy to the craft and creates methods that endear one to the brash yet creative persona of this particular artist.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 5, 2022

While perhaps erring on the side of worshipful, and not interesting in delving into Zappa's flaws, it is, nonetheless, gripping and thorough.

| Sep 13, 2021

"Legendary" is an adjective that gets thrown around a lot, often without too much justification. So too is "visionary", come to think of it. But Frank Zappa was both: insanely talented, intimidatingly intelligent and incorrigibly iconoclastic.

| Jul 14, 2021

Winter never seeks to solve or understand Zappa's singular mercurial character, and instead seeks to convey and celebrate the artist's mystical aura and puzzling persona.

| Jun 5, 2021

It's exciting, wonderfully disorienting and, at times quite funny...

| Mar 19, 2021

Mostly, Zappa is a terrific couple of hours, well-spent.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 16, 2021

A full account of how Zappa ran his own race throughout a dizzying, intermittently brilliant career that flitted across the mainstream and alternative music scenes is lovingly dispatched in Alex Winter's excellent, absorbing, long-belated profile.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 1, 2021

Lively, detailed and riveting, this documentary attempts the difficult feat of condensing Frank's life and impact into 129 minutes - and, regardless of whether you're already a fan or not, it does an impressive and engaging job.

| Mar 1, 2021

... moderately fluid as well as competently organized and edited... Zappa fans won't want to miss this.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 26, 2021

It makes a very good case that you should be interested in Zappa's work.

| Feb 25, 2021

If there is one American musician who was overdue for a comprehensive documentary, that's Zappa -- and this one doesn't disappoint. It's as messy as his music in parts, but that fits.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 24, 2021

Key to the success of the film is the editing, a pinballing assault of free association, claymation and gleeful profanity, which goes some way towards recreating what it must have been like to spend time inside Zappa's head.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 21, 2021

Winter has simply collated the resulting audio and video recordings into more than two hours of slightly sophomoric Zap-tastic musings on the pointlessness of commercial music, the need to fight the system and the tediousness of mainstream success.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 20, 2021

Winter has created a fascinating watch.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 19, 2021

Winter's film deserves a lot of credit for appreciating the full, intrepid range of Zappa's music, though penetrating the leathery mystery of his personality is perhaps a tall order.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 18, 2021

[A]n engrossing deep-dive into the music and life of Frank Zappa...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 18, 2021

A character study of a singular, irascible obsessive.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 13, 2021

This eye-catching collection of home movies, concert footage, animation, news reels, and interviews is an intriguing look at a perfectionist whose gaze was always pointed at the future.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 29, 2021

An often fascinating career retrospective chronicling the unlikeliest of American rock stars, a living, breathing contradiction in every aspect of his 52 too-short years on Earth.

| Original Score: B | Dec 25, 2020