✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Australia · 2022
1h 23m
Director Danny Cohen
Starring Courtney Barnett, Bones Salone, Dave Mudie, Katie Harkin
Genre Documentary, Music
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In 2012, Courtney Barnett started recording music in her inner-Melbourne bedroom. Since then, the shy but vastly talented singer/songwriter has amassed adoring fans across the globe. In 2018, she embarked on the world tour for her album Tell Me How You Really Feel – and director Danny Cohen tagged along to document the journey.
As a meditation on depression, anxiety and touring, Anonymous Club isn’t just valuable viewing for Barnett’s die-hard fans, though they will no doubt cherish this film which captures the artist at her most open, outside of her music. For the first time, we’re invited into the club.
The Playlist by Christian Gallichio
As a showcase of her creative process, as well as a dive into the repetition of touring, it’s a loving tribute to the artist and an invitation to listen to more of her music.
It’s a perfectly good rockumentary. It may be an even better group therapy session, led by one person’s unfiltered experience down in a hole yet resonating as deeply for anyone else still struggling to lift themselves up. Welcome to the club.
The New York Times by Glenn Kenny
Barnett muses on the contradiction of how, in one performance, she might be “vivid and alive” and in the next “distant,” even though she’s going through the same motions with each show.
Anonymous Club’s power is in its meditative nature, reflecting on the intersection of celebrity and creativity.
Washington Post by Michael O'Sullivan
The low-key music documentary “Anonymous Club” — ostensibly a portrait of Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett — kind of feels like a movie about someone who doesn’t really want to be in a movie.
Paste Magazine by Natalia Keogan
Though Cohen has made a formidable name for himself in the visual aesthetics of rock ‘n’ roll, his feature debut is unfocused and emotionally flimsy, no doubt a product of Cohen’s first-film inhibitions.
Anonymous Club isn’t an invitation. Don’t know the lyrics? Kind of hard to make them out. Underwhelmed by this guitar snippet or that one? Well, she does like the label “slacker garage rock.” Leave this one to the fans.
Anonymous Club is undoubtedly a film that Barnett fans will adore — but if you’re not familiar with her music, or perhaps not that into it, you may emerge a fan by the end. Or at least a fan of Cohen, who, through his sensitive lens, reminds us that the music of the best singer-songwriters is inspired by their own feelings — of joy, or sorrow, love or solitude — and can transcend the boundaries between the crowd and the person singing it.
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