Michael's Movie Grade: A-
A wonderful documentary on Leonard Cohen and what has become his best known song.
I absolutely love Leonard Cohen's music (I am listening to it as I write this review) and the man himself, so naturally this film had a huge attraction to me. It did not let me down in any way. This movie kept me glued to my seat through the whole runtime. While this movie can only tell so much in less than two hours, it still gives a wealth of information, and more than that one can tell the passion the filmmakers have for the subject matter. The clips of Leonard Cohen performing and being interviewed are priceless for those of us who love this wonderful artist. While we may already know much of the information given in the interviews to hear these words from Leonard's mouth make these scenes still incredibly engaging. The live performances make you remember just how much of a blessing this man and his music were. Like many documentaries this film also has new interviews. These interviews are with those who knew and worked with him as well as those who were inspired by him both directly and indirectly. Again even if you know the information stated here, these interviews are still engaging and valuable to any Leonard Cohen fan.
Yet as you can guess by the name of this movie, much of the focus is on his most famous song, Hallelujah. It not only covers Leonard's version of this song, but the many covers of the song, ranging from Jeff Buckley to Alexandra Burke to Eric Church. Even Vicky Jenson, the co-director of Shrek talked about its use in that film. While I still greatly prefer Leonard's version to these covers, I found this section also very interesting and I admit this is part of the film where I learned the most. I was not as familiar with these covers as I am with Leonard's version and found much of this very fascinating.
The only problem I had with this film is that the part of the documentary that is about Leonard Cohen's life and the part that is about the legacy of Hallelujah outside of Leonard's version, can get in the way of each other and this can become distracting.
This is an excellent documentary that I highly recommend to both long time Leonard Cohen fans and newcomers.
