Great Film overall

good back-story, and good acting

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This documentary has a lot of beautiful photography in it. A French film-maker, Dominique Tarlé, has produced a massive quantity of great photographs of the band during the period they evaded England for tax reasons (paying 93% in tax for all they made!) and went to the southern coast of France and made "Exile on Main St.", which I think is their best album. What ensued? Debauchery: drugs, the mafia, alcohol. Yes, but also a great album which had a lot of technical aspects to it that were hard to sort out due to everything being recorded in the basement of Keith's house where all the musicians were placed in different rooms due to leakage - and the album rocks, to say the least. This documentary plays on the good times the band had with each-other and their families, not on how things went pear-shaped towards the end and how they left. A remarkably fine documentary, especially image-wise.

What can you not say about Exile on Main St. ? This legendary record has it all, and to me so does this documentary. Not by any means this album intends to create an atmosphere, what this album does is capture an atmosphere. That atmosphere is that one of a decadent-bohemian lifestyle that made the Rolling Stones famous. That sex, drugs and RnR stuff. this record has it. And this documentary shows it. Narrated by the people who did it and the people who where there. Although this documentary might be only interesting for real Stones fans ( because its made for Stones fans ) can also be interesting for those who just want a glimpse of how this band works, because the process of making an album -in words of Keith Richards- is just as important as the album itself... and this is why !Features footage from Nellcote and live shows( Very nice ).The DVD also has some nice features including extended interviews and comments by Exile Fans including Jack White and Martin Scorsese among others.

As a promo for the re-release of Exile, the film does its job. But as other posters have noted there's not much of real substance here. Any Stones fan basically knows the background of the album and it has been covered although briefly in other bio-pics like 25 by 5, and in interviews. I was wanting a little more and by that I don't mean what Don Was and Will.a.am think of the recording. It would have been nice to see the writing process of a song through from beginning to end. The whole creative recording process from first germ of an idea to the final mix of the song. It could have been done too with the very same combination of stock footage, still shots , and interviews. Oh well the album is still great. And wow was Anita Pallenberg ever sexy then.

It must be said that the Stones have brilliantly drummed up a buzz about the re-release of their classic "Exile On Main Street" album, with a combination of press interviews, personal appearances and now this high-gloss patchwork documentary but you have to concede that it's pretty much worked - the album re-topped the charts in the UK and US some 38 years after its original release.So does this new documentary serve the music satisfactorily, well, yes and no, in my opinion. Naturally there are limited sources available - this was 1971 - 72 after all and so the producer has to cobble together only a little verite video of the sessions themselves, mixing this with latter-day interviews with the band, famous fans and others of their entourage, segments from the bootleg "Ladies and Gentleman...The Rolling Stones" concert film of their 1972 US tour (including the infamous incident where a blissed-out Keith and horn-player Bobby Keys throw a TV out their hotel window) and still photo montages of the band at the time. Of course one would wish for more actual footage of the band actually recording the album (although several inserts of tape recordings of the sessions are teasingly included) - for instance, quite annoyingly a great take of "Loving Cup" is interrupted half-way through in the rush to keep the talking going, surely a mistake, but the end result still serves the album well and gives a fascinating insight into the band's M.O. at the time (basically a drink/drug fuelled jamboree by the sounds of things).Out of all this emerged a superb double album of adrenalised, debauched rock and roll, with smatterings of country, gospel and blues, which to paraphrase a line used by Keith seems to have drained the band to the extent that they never hit this artistic height again. There's also little doubt from the evidence here that Mr Richards was the creative heart and soul of the album and this obviously not just down to the album being largely recorded in the basement of his house at the time.Pros and cons, well, on the plus side, every song gets an airing of some kind, it was nice to hear contributions from past Stones Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor and it was cool to hear a previously unheard title song for the album played over the end credits. On the down side, there's a pretty unnecessary visit by Mick and Charlie to their old London Olympic studio, ditto the footage shot in America and especially the fact no entry at all was apparently allowed to the scene of the crime itself, Richards' Nellcote mansion in the south of France.Yes, this movie has that Jagger-ised polish you would expect from control-freak Mick and one might have wished that this had been the Stones' "Let It Be" with film cameras set up to record the sessions 24/7 but under the circumstances, I still enjoyed the film and have been playing the album constantly ever since. Job done, I'd say!