Lou Reed's Berlin: Critic Reviews

This luminously shot concert movie reveals that Berlin is far from the lost masterpiece the movie wants it to be.

In Julian Schnabel's grimly majestic concert film Lou Reed's Berlin, Mr. Reed wears the deadpan smirk of a Zen master who has endured punishing Buddhist training.

Reed's unmistakable lilting groan has real pain in it, hinting at a real but undisclosed personal story behind the music.

A concert film by technicality, a cinematic trance in practicality.

Who could have guessed that nearly 35 years after its release, Lou Reed's once-reviled concept album Berlin would inspire a sold-out concert, shot with loving awe by Julian Schnabel?

As shot by the incomparable Ellen Kuras, the concert retains a rich organic feel, complementing the music without over-determining it.

Your enjoyment will hinge entirely on whether you think the album is a masterpiece or a bore.

Excellent concert docu revisits a neglected chapter in Reed's back catalog.

Reed's dour, bombastic song-suite about the lives of the drug-addicted and downtrodden steadily acquired cult cachet over the decades, peaking with its staging as a complete-album concert in 2006, which Lou Reed's Berlin documents.

A Lou Reed concert film that I connected with despite it being a downer.

Schnabel's set design, onstage projections, and postproduction add a good deal of visual noise to Reed & company's aural variety, which reproduces the album with a mixture of professional exactitude and unpredictable cacophony.

Those who admire Reed will find that Schnabel's film allows the music to speak for itself against its rather messy background.

Reed, who's looking more and more like a Bond villain, comes close to smiling at one point, although the chances are you won't.

It's Reed's gruff and tuneless delivery that challenges one's enjoyment.

An entirely watchable concert movie, providing depressing songs are your thing.

For devotees only, I'm guessing.

If you love Lou Reed or even like Lou Reed a little, musically this film is worth your time and, unless you've got an amazing audio system at home, it should be experienced in a theatrical setting.

If you don't like the music, there's nothing to see here.

For die-hard Reed fans, it's an invaluable document.

A well made concert film that will, nevertheless, fail to satisfy Reed's many dedicated fans.

Once again a concert documentary allows those of us unable to have witnessed a monumental event to see it seemingly exactly as it took place.

It's direly beautiful, sometimes spine-tingling and, yes, gloomy as purgatory.

Schnabel and Kuras know their subject enough to know how to frame him: with space, darkness, and unyielding cool.

For Reed fans -- for rock fans -- the movie is an essential document of a noteworthy event.

Schnabel is not exactly the ideal interpreter of Lou Reed's Berlin-years anguish. And the Berlin songs themselves don't transport one into that experience so much as convey a once-novel attitude.