Amazing Grace

Allowed 89 minutes • 2018 • 7.5

The year is 1972, and after eleven straight hits, the godmother of soul music Aretha Franklin sings at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles. Two nights of concert magic to be perpetuated on her legendary live album Amazing grace. On site is also Oscar-winning director Sydney Pollack, hired to catch the concerts on film. Only now, 47 years later, are the concert recordings released to the large audience. “It's almost hard to imagine any concert film that portrays its artist in a more marvelous light. Despite or because of it being almost inappropriately intimate, with images conveying every drop of sweat,” Nils Hansson writes in Dagens Nyheter.