David Maysles: Last News

In 1971, the Cannes Film Festival opened with a screening of Gimme Shelter by Albert and David Maysles, an immersive, vérité depiction of two weeks in the touring life of the Rolling Stones. If that was all it did, it might have been forgotten by now. But by a terrible freak of chance, the filmmakers followed the band to the most notorious concert of their entire career — the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in Livermore, CA, where the Stones, along with Santana, Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, were set to perform a free concert for 300,000 people on Dec. 6, 1969. “We didn’t know what it was going to be,” Albert said later. “We just had a childish faith that having seen the Stones and getting along with them, there might be a feature film there.”

Netflix will showcase a collection of short films chosen by Wes Anderson. On Dec. 9, the Aero Theatre will show Anderson’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” and “Ready, Steady, Zoom” at 12 p.m.

Guy Lodge Film Critic An Emmy-nominated documentary cinematographer with credits including “Procession” and “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Robert Kolodny puts his expert eye for shooting nonfiction to playful narrative use in his feature directing debut “The Featherweight.” A meticulously designed, gutsily played biopic of world champion featherweight boxer Guglielmo Papaleo, better known as Willie Pep — covering not his 1940s glory days but his faltering attempt at a comeback two decades later — the film is convincingly fashioned as a candid all-access documentary, a promotional puff piece curdling before our eyes into an unintended study of mental breakdown. So convincingly, in fact, that uninformed viewers chancing upon “The Featherweight” on the festival circuit may wonder exactly what it is they’re watching, not least if — in a realization of Pep’s own glumly stated fears — they have no idea who this once-celebrated sportsman was.

Victoria Beckham's much-anticipated second-ever Paris Fashion Week show likely won't have passed you by. A special milestone in the Beckham family calendar, the Spice Girl-cum-fashion designer exhibited her eponymous label's autumn/winter 2023 collection in Paris on Friday and it certainly lived up to expectations.

Gimme Shelter, directed by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwein, is widely considered one of the greatest music documentaries of all time.

In our new weekly series, we’re revisiting some of our favorite music movies—from artist docs and concert films to biopics and fictional fantasies—that are available to stream or rent digitally. Spoilers ahead.