Amy (2015)

Asif Kapadia's Amy assembles a decade of home video, backstage footage, and answering machine messages into a portrait of Amy Winehouse that plays like an autopsy conducted with affection. The director of Senna again trusts the archive over the talking head, letting his subject narrate her own decline through clips she never imagined would be arranged into an argument. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, which tells you what the industry thought of its restraint. The film is a tragedy of a specific woman, not a case study in anything larger.

The progressive instincts here are present but muted. There is a critique of how the tabloid press and the record business chewed through a young singer, and the camera lingers on the body-shaming and the bulimia with a sympathy that stops short of advocacy. The villains are specific editors and specific managers, not the economic order itself, so the anger stays personal and small. Winehouse's debt to Black American soul and jazz is audible in every track without ever becoming a thesis. Nobody in this film is asked to represent a category.

What remains is grief, professionally organized. The last act, following the Belgrade performance, the phone calls, and the funeral, is as heavy as documentary gets, and Kapadia earns the weight honestly. If the movie carries a sermon, it is the mild and familiar one that fame is a machine which eats the sensitive, delivered mostly through the faces of people who loved her. That is a moral, not a manifesto. The result is sad, exact, and largely unpolemical, which in the current climate counts as a quiet achievement. It never lectures. It just watches, and then it stops.