Critic Reviews

More powerful than an argument or a treatise, The Last Interview is an immersive experience. It will be a reminder for some and an eye-opener for others of why John Lennon mattered to people, and why his murder was so shattering.

For anybody who’s read the other interviews John and Yoko did around that time, there’s nothing terribly revelatory about the conversation in “John Lennon: The Last Interview.” But the immediacy that comes from hearing him talk about it can be thrilling, and Soderbergh’s and Nancy Main’s judicious editing fits plenty of the 165-minute interview into a 97-minute film.

Soderbergh has done an ace job of illustrating “The Last Interview” by turning it into a dreamy archival collage, accompanying John’s words (and Yoko’s too) with hundreds of photographs I had never seen before. (He also uses a handful of fantasy images created by AI; if they’d been devised with older technology, no one would care, and no one should care now.)

John Lennon: The Last Interview is a minor work in the canon of both Soderbergh and John/Yoko, but it’s a niche wellspring of hyper-detailed information for Beatles purists.

Rarely seen photos of Lennon and Ono reveal a charming, playful side to the couple. However Soderbergh has also used generative AI to create surreal images to illustrate 10 per cent of the film, which feels like a misstep because the poorly conceived pictures (streets flooded with oil, crying babies) are a world away from the tender story of loss and grief at the heart of this documentary.

There’s some enlightening substance and much poignancy in the words of John Lennon and Yoko Ono – but also much egregious AI-created visual ugliness – in John Lennon: The Last Interview,

Ironically, or not, the very tools Soderbergh has used to make the film distinctive ultimately render it indistinct and unmemorable.

No matter how pleasant and even insightful certain segments of the interview are, it would play immeasurably better as a stand-alone audio program than inorganically expanded into a feature film that’s part-archival and part-tech experiment.

There is archival interest and historic drama in what Lennon has to say – and especially for me in his generous, open-minded comments about newer bands such as the B-52s and the Clash. But this is a disappointment.

Deploying AI to resurrect John Lennon himself, even for a moment, is the one temptation he resists, thank God. But this cloying, nothing-to-see-here experiment is the next worst thing.