Grimerlana Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Casey Duggan It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Framescourer A unique film of a live concert. It's shot in a couple of ways; conventional, sepia filtered footage is intercut with Super 8. Rather like the music - sample-heavy, studio-based, soundscape-as-song - trying on a live outfit, the film sets itself up as both a concert document and a film-in-itself.The result is a bewildering triumph in all respects. The conceptual gamble of the orchestra and band at audience level (with no division save the dolly tracks) pays off - it feels live and genuinely intimate. Add a possessed, shamanic performance from Beth Gibbons, cocooned in the midst of the band, and we get the music like an IV shot. Watching the muted, monochromatic-filtered film was, for me, rather like looking at a painting by Mark Rothko: stripped of the clutter of context or content the experience becomes more direct.Luckily, the band don't push it. They're not above talking to the audience and the film cuts between the concert and scenes out on the street and footage both prior to and after the show. The end result is a concert that is no more than what it is, without claim or pretence. It's absorbing, oddly moving and almost insurmountably cool.

Mooby I am a Portishead freak. I doubt you would have come to this particular corner of the IMDb if you weren't either. If you have seen this tape, I'm winking as I type. If you haven't, make all the necessary, desperate attempts you can manage to make in your new life mission to get it. Beth Gibbons is like a New Age Shirley Bassey, squeezing all the OOMPH! she can out of every lyric and hissing it into the mic, she prowls Roseland with her intensity. Geoff Barrow, Adrian Utley, and Dave McDonald assist Miss Gibbons in her quest to touch souls with dead on choices. No song from either of their first two albums sound as good as they do when performed on PNYC. When assembled as one, the songs are musical paintings of relationship despair, like Beth's tragic torch songs to the boyfriend that failed to keep her. Every artistic motive is made to compensate from making a simple one shot of the band doing their thang, but in actuality, when you're dealing with what I consider (for my money) to be the greatest album of all time, all you need is a camera, an audience, and a couple of geniuses who call themselves Portishead.

GeDan This recorded concert brings forth angles of Portishead that cannot be found in just listening to their music. They provide the viewer/listener with an ambush of the senses, and watching how their incredible music is made makes it even more amazing. The ability to tie into one the numerous different sources of their sound proves that Portishead is not just one of the most ground-breaking musical acts of the 1990's, but also one of the most talented. Beth Gibbons shows off her beautiful voice and the rest of the musicians follow suit. There is so much one can say about how simply awesome this concert is, but the best thing to do is buy it and watch it over and over!

Lucas-21 This is one of the best video document of the 90's of a band.And also one of the best group...together with some other, Portishead prove in this film to be one of the most emotional, deep and liric group. Beth Gibbons is just amazing singing, able to move a rock with her voice.