The most savage and scathing reviews of the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black

The controversial Amy Winehouse biopic dropped on Netflix this week. You can now review Back to Black yourself without the effort of leaving the house or shelling out £10 to sit on a suspiciously sticky cinema seat.

Back to Black stars Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse, and was directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, the 57-year-old wife of 34-year-old Aaron Taylor-Johnson.

When Back to Black hit cinemas in May, a load of critics said “no, no, no” to it. Here’s a round-up of the most brutally honest reviews, that will either validate your own opinions or save you from the pain of watching it.

‘A poor, poor piece of filmmaking’

Hamish McBain from The Evening Standard did not hold back his opinions on the film’s accuracy (or lack thereof). He gave Back to Black a savage one star review, and wrote, “Before we even get to the deep moral and ethical problems, Back to Black is, on the most basic of levels, a poor, poor piece of filmmaking.

“So anyone coming to this film without any prior knowledge of Amy’s story should a) assume she got into hard drugs of her own accord – even though the real life Fielder-Civil is on record as saying “I got Amy into heroin” – and b) only have a short snippet of her recording Back to Black, the song, to get across what all the fuss is about.

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“Maybe not in 2024, but there will, in say 20 years’ time, be people whose first experience of Amy Winehouse is Back to Black. And this is a film that does not paint a nice or fair picture of her as a human, nor get across how special an artist she was. The final scene, in particular, with its completely and utterly baseless, sensationalist implications, made me physically gasp in horror.”

‘The baby subplot is a special brand of misogynistic nonsense’

A lot of critics were deeply unimpressed that the director Sam Taylor-Johnson decided to devote so much screen time to Amy moping about motherhood, instead of her actually singing. The film ends (spoilers!) with Amy crying after reporters tell her that her ex had a baby with someone else. If only there was something else to focus on in an Amy Winehouse biopic other than her not having children, like, I don’t know, that Grammy-winning album in the title?

(Note: although there were loads of tabloid stories in the 2000s about Amy Winehouse being sad that she didn’t have children, there were loads of tabloid stories in the 2000s about pretty much every female celebrity wanting children. The most that Amy Winehouse ever said about having children was when she told Rolling Stone in 2007, “I was put here to be a wife and a mum and look after my family.”)

Marisa Abela wearing some cracking shoes in Back to Black
(Image via Netflix)

Kristy Puchko wrote in her review of Back to Black for Mashable, “The baby subplot is a special brand of misogynistic nonsense… Implied within this is the idea that it is more tragic Winehouse died so young because she could have been a mother.” She added, “This papering over of Winehouse and her story isn’t just bland and boring — it’s offensive.” Ouch.

Laura Snapes wrote a whole article in The Guardian slating the baby subplot. “It renders Winehouse a barren void, reducing her lost potential to that of failing to fulfil her feminine duty rather than that of more life, more art and the peace she so sorely deserved. Somehow, Taylor-Johnson has imagined an even more miserable fate for a young woman whose life already resembled a horror story.”

‘Abela bears little resemblance to Winehouse’

Critics were pretty divided on Marisa Abela’s performance. While some journalists thought she did a reasonable job with the material she was given, others thought her acting just wasn’t it. In Entertainment Weekly, Maureen Lee Lenker wrote, “Winehouse’s drug binges and drunken stupors, which make up the majority of the film, feel blatantly acted — the kind of telegraphed performance choices you might expect to see in a school production rather than a major motion picture.”

@hymnsfromoverseas

Amys whole voice was jazzy and soulful. This movie is a big MISS! It doesnt even sound like they tried to make it sound like her, and it definitely doesnt look like her either. They missed so many parts of her life in it from what ive heard, and there are good documentaries to watch instead. This is so disrespectful to her. #amywinehouse #backtoblack #backtoblackfilm #amyamyamy #amywinehousebacktoblack #lioness #jazztok #soulmusic #blueeyedsoul #rnb #funk #neosoul #neofunk #jazzmusic #jazz #loveisalosinggame #ripamywinehouse

♬ original sound – Amy Jade Winehouse

A review in Vox titled “Back to Black is the worst of bad musical biopics” said that “Abela bears little resemblance to Winehouse, dressed in what looks like a last-minute Halloween costume.”

To be fair to Marisa Abela, it’s pretty hard to pretend to be both 17 and 27 in the same film.

‘It’s like a perfume ad’

Loads of critics and viewers felt like the film was a sanitised version of Amy Winehouse’s life that was too scared to show the extent of her struggles on screen.

The Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black is now on Netflix I beg of you do NOT waste 2 hours watching the most deplorable & sanitised, watered down interpretation of an icons life story cos you will NEVER EVER get those 2 hours back. pic.twitter.com/ILTWz7Sfbm

— Andrew McBride (@andrewmcb) September 12, 2024

Peter Hoskin also gave Back to Black a brutal one star review in the Daily Mail for downplaying Amy Winehouse’s struggles with addiction and eating disorders. “It’s like a perfume ad’s idea of addiction and mental illness; soft-focussed and pretty.

“It spends most of its time forcing her to make goo-goo eyes at her one-time husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, here played as a cheeky monkey with a bit of a coke habit by the overly buff Jack O’Connell.”

Mae Abdulbaki from ScreenRant also slated the film for not doing Amy Winehouse justice. She wrote: “She was a woman who contained multitudes, but you’d never really know that by watching Back to Black, a flimsy, one-dimensional biopic that reduces Winehouse (Marisa Abela) to tabloid headlines about her life and relationship with ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil (Lady Chatterly’s Lover’s Jack O’Connell). Back to Black is the worst type of biopic.”

Related articles recommended by this author:

• The Amy Winehouse biopic trailer has dropped, and nobody is sure what to think
• A side by side comparison of Back to Black’s cast and the real people they played
• Meeting at 19 to kids at 20, inside Aaron and Sam Taylor-Johnson’s age gap relationship

Feature image via Netflix