✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Sweden, United States · 2016
1h 31m
Director Kasper Collin
Starring Lee Morgan, Helen Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Larry Reni Thomas
Genre Music, Documentary, History
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Part jazz history, part true-crime tale, Kasper Collin’s new documentary employs extensive archival footage and new interviews to tell the tragic story of the magnificently talented trumpeter Lee Morgan and his common-law wife Helen, who murdered him in a New York bar in 1972.
Village Voice by Alan Scherstuhl
Collin and company are after climate, not weather. They steep us in our awareness that Morgan and his New York have been lost, that our glimpses of it must either be through memory or hazed-up photography — or the music itself.
The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij
An intriguing exposé of a gripping story.
Director Kasper Collins imbues this documentary with an ambiguous, unsettlingly empathetic emotional force.
New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein
It’s mesmerizing, too vivid to be evanescent, too precious to hold.
More than anything else the film becomes a celebration of these two lives and the era of music that both created and destroyed them.
It’s fitting that Kasper Collin’s excellent documentary I Called Him Morgan, a sleek, sorrowful elegy for the prodigiously gifted, tragically slain bop trumpeter Lee Morgan, is as much a visual and textural triumph as it is a gripping feat of reportage.
The Guardian by Jordan Hoffman
Kasper Collin’s I Called Him Morgan isn’t just the greatest jazz documentary since Let’s Get Lost, it’s a documentary-as-jazz.
The New Yorker by Richard Brody
The backbone of Collin’s film is the sole audio interview with Helen Morgan, made in 1996, shortly before her death. The story that she tells combines with the story that Collin builds around it to provide a revelatory and moving portrait of a great musician.
Screen International by Sarah Ward
Collin attempts to do more than recount facts; if he can’t always wholly capture the figures at the film’s centre, he can convey a sense of the time and place that Lee and Helen inhabited.
I Called Him Morgan hooks you from the first moments and glides effortlessly toward an emotionally impacting and enigmatic conclusion.
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