Stop Making Sense

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

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.

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.

The pleasure of the music is overpowering.

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.

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

Above all, the film is downright fun: a showcase for nine talented musicians enjoying themselves on stage, and itself an immersive expression of creative joy.

Stop Making Sense is all killer, no filler.

One of the best concert films in history in the cinema. [Full review in Spanish]

Stop Making Sense is probably the most famous of all concert-based documentaries – its unfiltered, boundless joy has prompted the footage to enter history ahead of any other similar concerts recorded at the time.