Glastonbury Reviews
Slant Magazine
It's hard to pin down the intent and even the honesty of the filmmaker.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Oregonian
Combining images of 30 years of politics, music, self-expression and alternative living, it's a vibrant, if inevitably scattered, film that manages to tread the fine line between chronicling the festival and exploiting it.
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| Original Score: B
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
An alternately rousing and repetitive 138-minute documentary spanning four decades of the Glastonbury Festival.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Austin Chronicle
The sense of total immersion is breathlessly complete.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
... captures the open-air rock festival experience more completely than any previous film of its kind.
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| Original Score: B+
Top Critic... as muddy as Yasgur's farm back in the day.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
For all the posers with light sticks and piercings, there are moments of Dada-esque beauty, not to mention some great music from Tinariwen, Bjork, David Bowie and the late, great Joe Strummer.
Reeling Reviews
What [Temple] does...is immerse his audience in the spirit of the festival with ingenious editing that shows the Glastonbury Festival as nothing short of a geographically bound society that just happens to exist for a few days a year.
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| Original Score: B+
Metromix.com
While the movie will clarify whether or not the fest is for you, you never feel like you're actually there.
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| Original Score: 2/4
St. Paul Pioneer Press
The movie's 135 minutes [feels] long. But the length is a product of [director] Temple's desire to cram in as much as he can. Despite the festival's drawbacks, it's obvious Temple loves everything about it. Even Coldplay.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The portrait is spectacular and inclusive, if sometimes a bit overwhelming and confusing.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A warm and witty, detailed look at this parallel universe.
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| Original Score: 3/4
TheWorldJournal.com
Temple is able to convey a perceptive and substantive mood pertaining to the staying power of this weirdly nuanced outdoor finger-snapping function.
Full Review | Comment | Original Score: 3/4
AV Club
The film is clearly an act of boosterism, and it makes a pretty good case for the Glastonbury cause.
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| Original Score: B
Los Angeles Daily News
Julien Temple's formless documentary Glastonbury aims to capture the festival's chaos and free-wheeling freakiness and accomplishes this goal.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The overall soundtrack seamlessly patches together a sonic quilt of eclectic music that evokes a kind of timeless flow. It's not a Glastonbury of any particular vintage, but rather a continuum of experiences that have occurred on this sacred ground.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul
Pretentiously impressionistic, sloppy almost to the point of self-parody, [director Julien] Temple's film is New Journalism without the journalism -- or, alas, the drugs.
ÜberCiné
Super-scintillating. We're fortunate to have a bright, bold documentary like Glastonbury to remind us how fun, weird and wonderful life can be.
Time Out
A frenetic cut-and-paste job that is free of voiceover, commentary or even titles to introduce interviewees. Such calculated vagueness works, and the lingering impression is of a messy and hedonistic free-for-all.
