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Reviews Counted:21
Fresh:18
Rotten:3
Average Rating:6.6/10
Consensus: It never gets close enough to its subject, and it's curiously light on music, but this documentary is nonetheless a long-overdue tribute to a brilliant musician.
By far the most powerful element is N'Dour's lone voice, a thing of high, pure beauty that feels at once ancient and new. When he sings, an otherwise earnestly conventional film becomes a vehicle of incantatory power.
Top CriticInspirational concert film.
This documentary by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi could have used more music for my taste, and fewer talking heads. But it’s absorbing all the same. N’Dour is the sort of humanitarian bridge that we need in a world so sharply divided.
Top CriticBe sure to stay through the closing credits as the scenes of Senegalese life act as a captivating coda to a film pulsing with music and memory.
Top CriticYoussou N'Dour is a beautiful film to watch as it unfolds the life of N'Dour and, by extension, the lives of millions of West Africans who are anonymous to many in the West.
Top CriticWhen the music starts playing, it's easy to forgive the film's flaws.
N'Dour is the film's unstoppable force, handsome and radiating joy. He's the kind of performer who is larger than life but always seems like one of the family.
Top CriticAn inspiring and edifying cinematic exploration of the power of music and the soul of a big-hearted African Sufi singer who has used his exceptional talent and creativity to make a better world.
Although his movie often resembles the kind of promotional video one might find as an extra on a concert DVD, N'Dour in full throttle is a sight, and sound, to behold.
Love looks and sounds great, but in depicting N’Dour as a lofty symbol for music’s power to bridge worlds and inspire, it sometimes loses sight of the man.
While the rambling, repetitive look at his life off stage is unevenly edited, his music is gloriously heard and seamlessly presented to an appreciative global audience.
Documentary about a great world-music performer is colorful but also suffers from a certain blandness and repetitiveness. A pure concert movie with biographical interruptions would have been preferable.
A lively, soulful documentary that lacks sufficient insight into the life of Youssou N'Dour.
[Director] Vasarhelyi offers only generalities on the Egypt dispute and never really tells us about N'Dour the man.
Top CriticThe director, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, is in thrall to her subject, and dewy-eyed accounts of pop stars, even those with as compelling a biography as Mr. N'Dour, tend to wear out their welcome.
Top CriticFans and newcomers to N'dour's music will be equally enthralled by the finely observed, patiently wrought documentary.
Though we see the same man throughout the bumpy tour captured here -- always calm, steady, faithful -- it's bound to prove an enlightening portrait for those who know him only as the guy who once worked with Peter Gabriel.
Top CriticThe performance excerpts, starting with the head-clearing invocational introduction, are by far the most interesting part of the show.
Top CriticWhen the movie lets the music do the talking, you understand the singer’s determination to see the album through. Praise filtered through pop is never an easy sell, but such gorgeously transcendental expressions can’t -- and shouldn’t -- be ignored.
Director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi's passion for her devout Sufi Muslim subject blinds her to a need for shaping a coherent story in a puffy documentary that goes slack with gooey adulation more often than not.
June 21, 2009:
Trailer & Poster review 
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