Critic Reviews

Don't Look Back is a spellbinding portrayal of a gifted artist at the peak of his creative brilliance.

The total effect of these sequences is the feeling of hanging out with Dylan and his entourage. This is perhaps Don’t Look Back‘s greatest trick – convincing its audience that the Dylan we see here is anything other than a column of air: elusive, shifting and perpetually enigmatic.

Both a great concert movie and an amazing documentary of mid-'60s cutting-edge pop culture, this cinema verite record of Bob Dylan's pre-electric, pre-Band 1965 British tour was such a candid and unsparing look at stardom's inner sanctums and Dylan's caustic personality, audiences were shocked. [29 Oct 1999, p.M]

The film is one of the great portraits of the artist as impossibly gifted young snot. [31 Dec 1999]

Pennebaker has fashioned a relentlessly honest, brilliantly edited documentary permeated with the troubador-poet's music.

Easily one of the best documentaries on any subject ever made. It is also one of the most cinematically influential.

Even 48 years after its release, and well into Dylan’s current phase of relative transparency, D.A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back retains something of a forbidden quality, a feeling that we shouldn’t be privy to the things it shows us.

An intimate portrait of the Bringing It All Back Home Bob Dylan during his final acoustic tour through England, it hits with escalating emotional force as the decades go by, capturing a fleeting musical period as brilliantly as any movie ever has. [07 Jan 2000]

As fascinating as it is to peek in and eavesdrop on what appears to be an authentic Bob Dylan, Dont Look Back captures something that’s perhaps even more indicative of the songwriter’s nature: Dylan in transition.

It is an absorbing film. Whether one is a member of the under-30 set that regards Mr. Dylan as a spokesman, or one of the vanishing Americans over that age, this look into the life of a folk hero is likely to be both entertaining and occasionally disturbing.