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The best music documentaries of 2021, from Britney’s quest for freedom to the Beatles’ final days to Billie Eilish’s journey to fame
- Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back traces the band’s final days, while Billie Eilish’s rise to fame is the subject of The World’s a Little Blurry
- Controlling Britney Spears offers a blow-by-blow account of the court proceedings as the singer sought to escape a conservatorship overseen by her father
Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
The chase for eyeballs has been a boon for eardrums.
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With a flood of money pouring in from streaming platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV+ and Disney+ as they chase subscribers, artists young and old are cashing fat cheques for the screen rights to their lives, on- and offstage (so long as they retain final cut).
Meanwhile, acclaimed directors including Peter Jackson (The Beatles: Get Back) and Todd Haynes (The Velvet Underground) have been drawn to music documentaries in ways not seen since Martin Scorsese fixed his lens on The Band for The Last Waltz or Jonathan Demme shot the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense.
2021 produced so many first-rate music documentaries. Here are some great moments from this year’s bounty.
The Beatles: Get Back
One thing’s for certain: The success of Jackson’s documentary, which traces the band’s final days through the precise culling and editing of 60 hours’ worth of filmed footage into eight, has legacy groups scouring their archives for their own documentary studio footage.
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