8/10
Great!
1 May 2023
Warning: Spoilers
Pink Floyd, Def Leppard, T. Rex, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Scorpions, Paul McCartney & Wings, the Alan Parsons Project, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Electric Light Orchestra, Rainbow, Styx and more. All of these artists used Hipgnosis, the English design group made up of Storm Thorgerson, Aubrey Powell, and Peter Christopherson. They became nearly as big of rock stars as the bands they did art for.

Directed by Anton Corbijn (whose work in music videos has similarities in becoming a rock star to rock stars just like Hipgnosis) and written by Trish D Chetty, Squaring the Circle gets into the artists' best-known work, such as Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon while hearing about the influence -- and what it was like to be part of that art -- thanks to interviews with McCartney, Pink Floyd's Roger Waters, David Gilmour and Nick Mason. Zeppelin's Robert Plant and Jimmy Page and Peter Gabriel.

Corbijin told The Hollywood Reporter, ""At 17, I started taking photos of musicians who created the soundtrack of my youth, first for magazines and later for record covers, and then trying out moving images as a director for music videos from the early '80s onwards. It was a long road, but I eventually made feature films: my first one, Control, dealt with music I loved, and now my first documentary deals with record covers and their beauty and power, and the craziness to get there. It has been an honour to tell Hipgnosis', Storm's, and Po's, story in Squaring the Circle, which, thanks to the great team at Utopia, will be a cinema release in the first half of 2023."

This is a gorgeous film that tells me so much of what I want to know about a time and place that I want to know more about. As such, it's nearly perfect, getting across the emotions and real people behind the art that has been made nearly mythical today.
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