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# Review: Back to Black (2024)
- URL: https://pamphleteer.co/post/review-back-to-black-2024/
- Published: 2024-05-22T17:46:13.000Z
- Updated: 2026-05-17T11:03:28.000Z
- Author: Jerod Ra'Del Hollyfield
- Tags: Movies, #Import 2026-08-01 20:40

“I want people to hear my voice and just forget their troubles for five minutes,” Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela) says in voiceover as she runs down a London street. It’s the kind of sentiment one would expect from a big-budget popstar biopic of a figure mired in tragedy and unrepentant substance abuse. But this recounting of Winehouse’s life is also a Sam Taylor-Johnson movie, so all is not what it seems. 

As the opening begins to warrant eye-rolling, Taylor-Johnson cuts to Winehouse reading these words from a diary entry she wrote as a teenager, leaving us to wonder how someone so in thrall to adolescent cliché ended up producing one of the most emotionally raw records in rock history. Rather than ripped-from-the-headlines melodrama, we see Winehouse interacting with her beloved nan (Lesley Manville), who would also become the primary inspiration for her grandaughter’s hybrid of fifties glamor, blues, and R&B–the pioneering sound that paved the way for the likes of Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift’s more managed eras. 

Most famous for her photography in *Interview* magazine, Taylor-Johnson has always been more interested in interrogating iconography than succumbing to tawdry self-seriousness. Such makes her a rightful heir to that publication’s founder, Andy Warhol. Consequently, her work often provokes hostility from critics who can’t see beneath the surface. Such is why her *Fifty Shades of Grey* remains a punchline a decade after its release even though it's a movie about the reality of corporate power on par with *The Social Network*.

*Back to Black* has no patience for dramatizing hard drug use and bulimia. We had our fill of that in the years before Winehouse’s untimely death. Instead, Taylor-Johnson offers an astute exploration of pop mythos that elevates the traditional above the tabloid nihilism that probably would have garnered it much better reviews.