‘Dio: Dreamers Never Die’ Review: Portrait of a Metal Gentleman Who Only Sang Like the Devil

variety.com:

Chris Willman Music WriterIn music’s metal subculture, the late singer Ronnie James Dio may still count as the genre’s most widely beloved figure, which makes him ripe for a documentary.

He was almost completely uncontroversial, which doesn’t necessarily bode as well for such a treatment. The dude who popularized the so-called “devil horns” hand gesture was no demon.

He just played one on MTV, or at least enjoyed dragging out the sinister imagery, even if in in real life he came off as a friendly upstate New York guy who’d made it big with a penchant for vaguely mystic imagery and a mountain-king-sized voice that could fill the biggest halls.“Dio: Dreamers Never Die,” the latest in a series of effective, mostly unpretentious rock docs produced by BMG, doesn’t present its subject as a particularly tortured or even complicated guy.

It may be the most drugless documentary ever made about a preeminent hard-rock figure (although a line of coke does make a cameo appearance in the archival footage).