The 30 greatest concert films of all time, ranked

The granddaddy of all benefit shows, The Concert For Bangladesh served to raise awareness for refugees from the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. Alarmed by their plight, George Harrison first recorded a charity single (“Bangla Desh,” released in the summer of ’71), then teamed with his friend Ravi Shankar for a pair of star-studded shows at Madison Square Garden that August. There were problems during the filming, as perhaps should be expected for one of the first large-scale concert films, but seeing Harrison at his solo 1970s prime, performing with a band featuring Leon Russell, Billy Preston, Eric Clapton and Badfinger, makes The Concert For Bangladesh worth seeking out, as does the surprise four-song set by Bob Dylan.

Released over 30 years after the initial footage was shot, Festival Express documents a tour that, by that point, had been largely forgotten: a traveling festival featuring the Grateful Dead, the Band, Janis Joplin, and the Flying Burrito Brothers, who traversed three Canadian cities on a train during the summer of 1970. Director Bob Smeaton intersperses the original footage from director Frank Cvitanovich and cinematographer Peter Biziou with talking heads that tell the story. But the highlights are the candid, sometimes soused, jam sessions between a bunch of kindred spirits. The birth of jam rock can be heard here.

High on the massive breakthrough of The Joshua Tree, U2 wanted to document their journey through the heart of America during the supporting tour for the album in 1987, and decided to record a new album for good measure. That’s a lot to take on at once, so it’s little wonder that as an album and film U2: Rattle And Hum is a mess, but its sprawl is visceral and compelling. At a peak of their powers, U2 sounds mighty onstage, and hearing them navigate the distance between their continental post-punk heritage and American roots-rock is compelling, especially when the group chooses to collaborate with a musical titan like B.B. King on their original “When Love Comes To Town.”

Long before they transformed into the millennial version of the Who, seizing every opportunity to reunite that came their way, LCD Soundsystem offered an ideal punctuation mark on their career with Shut Up And Play The Hits, a 2012 film preserving the band’s farewell gig at Madison Square Garden in 2011. There is a documentary aspect to the film, including interviews with the band’s leader, James Murphy, but it’s best seen as a document of the moment when LCD Soundsystem seemed invincible, a group who tapped into the empathy and anxieties of a new millennium flush with possibilities.

Never intended for public consumption, the footage that comprises Michael Jackson’s This Is It consists of behind-the-scenes film of Michael Jackson preparing for what was planned to be his 2009 comeback tour. Jackson died during these rehearsals, so this is less a concert film than a suggestion of what might’ve been. Turns out, that’s plenty exciting. Jackson may not move with the grace he did at the height of Thriller, but he’s still a magnetic performer and it’s fascinating to watch him at work.

A sequel of sorts to Stop Making Sense, David Byrne: American Utopia is Spike Lee’s document of Byrne’s Broadway show, which itself was an adaptation of the supporting tour for his 2018 album, American Utopia. Designed so the musicians showed no apparent connecting cords to amplifiers—everything was transmitted wirelessly, allowing the performers full freedom of movement on stage—American Utopia is fluid and electric in its flow, a quality Lee captures by staying focused on the intimacy of the performance. Few concert films feel as complete as American Utopia: the thought and craft from stage to screen is evident.

Shine A Light offers something a bit different from the standard Rolling Stones concert film, of which there are many. Where Gimme Shelter and Let’s Spend The Night Together capture extravaganzas, this Martin Scorsese-directed film documents a performance at the Beacon Theatre in 2006. A smaller venue doesn’t mean there’s not a sense of spectacle. The crowd is filled with famous people, as is the stage: Jack White, Buddy Guy, and Christina Aguilera all have guest spots. While Scorsese’s roving camera gives the film a sense of kineticism, what resonates is not the flash but the intimacy. And now that drummer Charlie Watts is gone, it’s poignant to see him drive the Stones through a set as no-nonsense as this.

Completed in 1974 and largely unseen until 2015, when it received a release after the death of its director, Les Blank, A Poem Is A Naked Person documents roots music maverick Leon Russell at his peak. Filmed between 1972 and 1974, Blank’s movie captures Russell just as he eased from the wings into the spotlight, thanks to the hit single “Tight Rope.” Blank surrounds Russell with freewheeling footage of Oklahoma and its residents, but the concert footage and live-in-the-studio performances are astonishing, preserving the power of Russell’s careening worldview in a way his records do not.

A vivid portrait of another time and place, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party captures a concert Dave Chappelle threw in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood on September 18, 2004. At the time, the comedian was riding high on the success of his Comedy Central hit Chappelle’s Show, and he chose another hot commodity of the time as his director: Michel Gondry, who was fresh from Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. In the nearly two decades since the film’s release, their careers have waned, Clinton Hill has changed, and the warm, inclusive R&B and hip-hop of the Roots, Erykah Badu, Mos Def, Jill Scott and a reunited Fugees have fallen out of fashion, but a viewing of Dave Chappelle’s Block Party makes this moment seem as alive as ever.

Designed to preserve the entire carnival surrounding the Grateful Dead in 1974, The Grateful Dead Movie draws from five shows the band held at San Francisco’s Winterland in October 1974. With the Dead planning an extensive hiatus in the mid-1970s, the film was intended to satiate the needs of Deadheads jonesing for a long, strange trip. The immense cost of the film, especially its opening animated sequence, forced the group to return to the road in 1976, a year before The Grateful Dead Movie’s release. By that point, the group had changed so much—drummer Mickey Hart had returned to the fold, the overwhelming “Wall of Sound” PA system had been replaced—that the film already seemed like a tantalizing artifact from another time, which is how it plays today: a suitably mind-bending voyage back to one of the Dead’s weird, wooly peaks.

Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars captures the moment David Bowie surprised the public and his band by claiming at the end of his July 3, 1973 show at London’s Hammersmith Odeon that this was “the last show we’ll ever do.” Whether director D.A. Pennebaker had knowledge of this proclamation is unclear. There’s some suggestion that Pennebaker’s very presence means Bowie and his label realized this would be a show worth preserving, but the footage has a decidedly DIY spirit that suggests the filmmaker was working on the fly. The result is a gritty, exciting film that seems designed to be shown at midnight movies: it’s simultaneously grand and grimy.

Homecoming: A Film By Beyoncé documents Beyonce’s triumphant headlining spot at the 2018 Coachella Festival. Those concerts happened a year later than originally planned: she was slated to perform in 2017, not long after the release of Lemonade, but doctors advised her not to perform until after the birth of her twins that summer. When she appeared in 2018, there was a sense that a pin had been removed from a grenade. What impresses about Beyonce: Homecoming isn’t only the energy, but its sense of personal and public history. She shared the stage with her husband Jay-Z and sister Solange, as well as her former Destiny’s Child bandmates Michelle Williams and Kelly Rowland, their presence conveying the scope of Beyonce’s career. But her emphasis on Black culture and feminism is what gives the film not only its depth but its kinetic power.

Not quite a concert, not quite a documentary, The Kids Are Alright offers an astonishing array of live performances from the Who, all recorded between 1964 and 1978. A long-time collector of vintage Who footage at a time it was not so easy to amass a library of rare clips, director Jeff Stein assembled a film that demands to be played loud. Opening with a clip of the Who destroying the set at the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, the film swiftly ping-pongs between eras, offering the last live (in the studio) film of original drummer Keith Moon, along with such classic Who moments as their spot at Woodstock and their mini-rock opera “A Quick One, While He’s Away,” delivered during The Rolling Stones Rock And Roll Circus, a performance so good that the Stones pulled the plug on their own project so they wouldn’t be upstaged by their guests. Taken in total, it’s a glorious testament to the Who’s sheer power.

Shot at Madison Square Garden in the middle of the Beastie Boys’ supporting tour for 2004’s To the 5 Boroughs, Awesome: I Fuckin’ Shot That is comprised of footage entirely shot by audience members. Fifty attendees were given a camcorder and instructions to shoot the entire show, then director Adam Yauch—operating under his nom de plume Nathaniel Hornblower; in the film, the character is personified by David Cross—stitched together the clips into an unusually exciting concert film. Where most concert films rightly showcase the performer on stage, this replicates the feeling of being part of the crowd.

A staple of midnight movies and late-night viewing for decades, The Song Remains The Same is anchored by footage shot during Led Zeppelin’s three-night residency at Madison Square Garden in 1973. While the flights of fantasy sequences surrounding the basic concert footage can be absurd, the live performances—including a handful re-created in the studio—go a long way in preserving the might and majesty of Zeppelin at the peak of their powers.

Using outtakes from Bob Dylan’s four-hour film Renaldo And Clara along with the film itself, Martin Scorsese conjured the mischievous Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story out of a mess of live footage, play acting, and documentary footage. Scorsese extended Dylan’s impish humor with a series of new interviews, and while these jokes and japes are amusing what astounds is the full roar of the careening Rolling Thunder Revue, an ungainly outfit that barely could be contained on stage and seems even wilder on film.

The Summer Of Soul refers to the six Sundays of arts and culture that comprised the Harlem Cultural Festival, held at Mount Morris Park between June and August 1969. Television producer Hal Tulchin filmed hours of footage of the event but after an initial airing in 1969, the recordings sat unseen until a team of producers approached Questlove with the idea of turning it into a colorful celebration of a point in time when pop singers the 5th Dimension, funk pioneers Sly & the Family Stone, blues guitarist B.B. King, rockers the Chambers Brothers, uptown soul singers Gladys Knight & the Pips, and jazz musicians Max Roach and Nina Simone converged to illustrate the depth and range of Black culture at the end of the 1960s.

Director Adrian Maben approached Pink Floyd with a distinct idea: he wanted to make a film that concentrated entirely on the band, not their interaction with the crowd. After some brainstorming, Floyd and Maben decided to stage a concert at an ancient Roman amphitheater in Pompeii, a setting that proved to be an ideal showcase for the spacey, searching material from Meddle, the newest record from the group that October 1971. Supplementing the Pompeii footage with live studio performances, stock film, and visual art, Maben wound up conveying the mind-altering aspects of Floyd’s music while also capturing the band’s peculiar chemistry.

Chuck Berry’s 60th birthday was no small affair. Stars descended into St. Louis to play a pair of tribute concerts at the Fox Theatre, with a band led by Keith Richards and featuring pianist Johnnie Johnson, who played on most of Chuck’s original hits for Chess. Taylor Hackford’s Hail Hail Rock ‘N’ Roll contains not only highlights from the concerts but interviews with Berry, his peers, and acolytes, plus rehearsals where the tension between Chuck and Keith is evident. All this footage hints at the complexities of Berry’s personality while the film itself is a showcase for his consummate skills as a showman.

Elvis Presley made his return to live performances late in 1969 with a series of concerts at the International Hotel in Las Vegas. Those went so well that Presley’s camp decided not only to extend his run at the International Hotel but to take it on the road, documenting the whole shebang as a feature film. The resulting Elvis: That’s the Way It Is shows that the jumpsuited Presley was hardly a joke at the dawn of the 1970s: he was a fiery, charismatic performer who clearly thrived being in front of a crowd after a long, long time away from a stage.

A document of Madonna at the absolute zenith of her popularity, Madonna: Truth Or Dare combines footage shot by director Alek Keshishian during the 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour. Initially conceived as a strict concert film, Keshishian expanded the scope to capture the madness backstage, including memorable cameos from Kevin Costner and Warren Beatty. Those sequences, all shot in black and white, crackle with barbed humor, but the color concert footage also dazzles: the staging is inventive and the performances are passionate.

Stax Records held their Wattstax festival at the Los Angeles Coliseum on August 20, 1972, pegging the event to the 30th birthday of their biggest star, Isaac Hayes, while also nodding to the seventh anniversary of the Watts Riots. Later dubbed the “Black Woodstock,” Wattstax wasn’t quite as freewheeling as the three-day blast at Bethel, New York, but it nevertheless was a triumphant expression of Black Power, made all the more impressive by the fact that it showcased the roster of one particular record. Stax had gospel, jazz, blues, harmony soul groups, funk and, in Isaac Hayes, a figure that tied all those strands together. Seeing all this diversity in one film remains stunning.

Intended as a triumphant event to close the Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour, the Altamont Free Concert turned into a historical disaster culminating with the death of concertgoer Meredith Hunter at the hands of Hell’s Angels. Gimme Shelter—a film directed by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin—captures the acute bad vibes of the show, a sense of menace that permeates the Stones’ set, culminating in the attack on Hunter during “Under My Thumb.” Watching Gimme Shelter build to this moment, it becomes evident that the movie is why the sentiment that Altamont represented the end of the 1960s became an axiom: it conveys a sense of apocalyptic finality.

It was an event for Aretha Franklin to return to gospel music in 1972, so it’s little wonder that she intended to accompany the release of her double-live-album Amazing Grace with a film documenting its recording. As initially directed by Sydney Pollack, the film never materialized due to technical issues with the audio. It sat in the vault until producer/director Alan Elliott purchased the footage in 2007. He finally brought it to the silver screen 11 years later, after Franklin’s estate agreed to have the film receive a public release. At that point, the power of Amazing Grace quickly became one of the great concert films, a document of one of the finest gospel and soul singers of the 20th Century at full flight.

The Monterey International Pop Festival was essentially ground zero for the modern rock festival, the event that invented the idea of an eclectic, multi-day festival that wasn’t constricted by genre. Thanks to ABC’s intention to air highlights as part of its Movie of the Week series, director D.A. Pennebaker was there to chronicle the commotion onstage. When ABC pulled the plug, Pennebaker shaped it into a film titled Monterey Pop featuring the Who, Simon & Garfunkel, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, the Mamas & the Papas, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, turning it into a definitive document about the emerging American counter-culture at the time.

There had been plenty of cheapo rock and roll movies in the 1960s but The T.A.M.I. Show exists at an entirely different level than other early concert films. Shot over two days at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in late October 1964, The T.A.M.I. Show captures the rise of both Motown and the British Invasion—Marvin Gaye, the Supremes and the Rolling Stones are all on the bill—while also making space for acts like Lesley Gore, Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys. There’s something captivating about every act, but James Brown’s set is so fiery he seems nearly superhuman.

Sign ‘O’ The Times might now be considered Prince’s greatest album, but it didn’t necessarily tear up the charts upon its release. Because of this, he decided to send out a concert film shot in Europe in June 1987 as a way to muster up enthusiasm for the project. The gambit didn’t work: the film barely made a dent at the box office. But while it wasn’t a hit at the time, the movie, like the album it accompanies, is now seen as a definitive document of Prince at his prime.

The granddaddy of all concert films, Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 documentary, Woodstock, chronicled the 1969 Woodstock festival, playing a little fast and loose with the timeline of the multi-day concert itself. Bands were presented out of order, some acts chose not to be captured on film, and Wadleigh wound up emphasizing Crosby, Stills & Nash, Richie Havens, and Jimi Hendrix, perhaps to the detriment of others on the bill. The historical record was preserved on Rhino’s 38-disc box Back To The Garden, leaving the film to be what it always has been: an expert exercise in myth-making that helped turn a mud-soaked weekend into a legend.

Tired of the road, the Band decided to deliver a farewell concert at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving day in 1976. Initially planned as a simple goodbye by the Band, they quickly had the idea of inviting their mentors Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan and, from there, they decided to deliver a grand parting gesture touching upon every aspect of their music. Close to the concert, leader Robbie Robertson asked director Martin Scorsese to film the show and they wound up with the lavish spectacle The Last Waltz, a film that romanticized the Band’s idiosyncratic interplay while also letting such guests as Dylan, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Muddy Waters shine. It winds up not only as a tribute to the Band but the times they inhabited.

Stop Making Sense is the greatest concert film ever made because director Jonathan Demme focused on one particular concert, never breaking away from Talking Heads onstage. Boasting an extended lineup, including the legendary funk keyboardist Bernie Worrell, Talking Heads take advantage of the extra manpower and large canvas by playing a concert that has a genuine narrative thrust. Opening with David Byrne wandering onstage with a boombox, the concert stage fills out, first with bassist Tina Weymouth, then drummer Chris Frantz, and finally guitarist/keyboardist Jerry Harrison, each additional member helping to flesh out Byrne’s songs. Then the auxiliary musicians are added as the staging grows increasingly ambitious. The proceedings become artier but never lose their intimate passion, a combination that somehow grows more thrilling over the years.

While our top 30 list provides a comprehensive look at the finest concert films ever made, there are plenty of other films that landed just outside our ranking. Here then, in no particular order, are 10 more concert films that are well worth exploring.

Neil Young: Heart Of Gold

Ladies And Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones

No Nukes

The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball

Jay-Z: Fade To Black

The White Stripes: Under Great White Northern Lights

Rust Never Sleeps

Katy Perry: Part Of Me

Metallica: Through The Never

Jazz On A Summer’s Day