Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten: Critic Reviews

The Future Is Unwritten captures the Joe Strummer who, in the late 1970s, just about firebombed the rock establishment with his fury.

Leaves behind a surprising afterglow and allows you to appreciate Joe Strummer's warmth.

Temple's film is a fittingly conscientious and absorbing tribute to his complex, contradictory personality.

Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten is one artist's moving tribute to another: director Julien Temple's poetic evocation of the life of punk's greatest troubadour.

Suffused with clear-eyed affection for its subject and times, this is not your little brother's punk documentary.

The Future Is Unwritten is less a eulogy than a wake, and one in which the subject is startlingly present.

The movie fascinates not so much because of Strummer, whose brooding temperament and flash-and-burn career arc seems pretty routine by rock standards, but because of the way Temple organized and edited the film.

Temple has plenty of cinematic tricks and willing interview subjects.

The singer's life is compressed into a two-hour montage of interviews, vintage video snippets and artsy filigree in Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten.

The story illustrates how easily political art can be hijacked by the other side, and it illuminates the anguish of a man who spent the last 20 years of his life wrestling with his legacy.

Julian Temple has done cinematic justice to the punk humanist born John Graham Mellor.

Future is overlong and will best be enjoyed and understood by fans, but even newcomers will appreciate the essential drive of the man, who died of a sudden heart attack in 2002, and admire his ability to balance anger and ecstasy.

The late punk rock legend Joe Strummer is rendered fully human in Julian Temple's engrossing and all-encompassing portrait.

Compelling viewing, even for people who don't care a bit for the punk scene.

Julien Temple's film is an energizing work of art, a visually striking and inspiring look at a band that never 'sold out' and the leader who saw to it that they didn't.

Miracle of miracles, a valuable portrait of Strummer manages to emerge from the chaos, helped by the film's one consistent thread: tapes of a BBC World Service radio show he hosted in his final years.

Temple, who chronicled the Sex Pistols...offers the full, sometimes bloated, context of Strummer's life through the testimony of his many friends and collaborators.

Celebrates Strummer's fecundity and self-invention and honors his reticence and private despair, reminding us along the way what a contradictory and amazing affair a single human life is.

A rock documentary that's a good as it gets.

A beautiful, evocative collage composed of concert footage, photographs, interviews and film clips, as well as interviews with people who knew him, the film is a rigorously thorough biography and an impassioned accolade.

Lively doc on the late Brit punk rocker guitarist for the Clash.

This offers Strummer fans unlimited access to the man behind the legend. Though it really is for fans - who should run and buy it.

The big unanswerable question is: Do we wish Strummer would have listened to David Lee Roth's advice that "You don't have to take life so seriously, honey"?