Recensioni de* critic*

Perhaps too singular and powerful a presence to excel in films in which he wasn't the star, Prince left us with a filmography that is short and bittersweet. The film encapsulates the transcendent, spiritual side to his music, but also its undertow of violence and insouciant sexuality.

for all its over-seriousness and overt silliness, all that really needs to be said about the 90 minutes draped so lovingly between those performance set pieces, is that it is still so much better than it ever had to be. Any film featuring the entirety of this album is already awesome by default, but Purple Rain is a better movie written for a song than most songs written for a movie.

Unbearably campy in its daytime scenes and nearly sublime in the nighttime sequences (Donald Thorin, who shot this, was also the cinematographer on the greatest of all Night Movies, THIEF), PURPLE RAIN, Prince's Albert Magnoli-directed Minneapolis Sound creation myth/excuse-for-concert-footage forms a strange counterpart to UNDER THE CHERRY MOON...

[It gave] Prince unfettered freedom in demonstrating his astounding athleticism and stagecraft... As a film, it's rather less than a Prince, but it's also no A Flock of Seagulls. It's surprisingly entertaining a quarter-century later; indeed, from an era of pseudo-musicals, Purple Rain is possibly the most classically shaped, a film about performance as well as including it, offering in its musical sequences a mode for its main character to express his inner self in a way he can't otherwise.

The film is obvious, and conflict is merely prelude to (Prince and) the Resolution, but Magnoli's professional, downright neorealistic approach to filming the concert clips almost disguises how audacious a structural conceit is the film's climax: nearly a half-hour of musical numbers that render the solipsism of Prince's vanity project entirely justifiable.

A musical film in a true, full, rich sense: it is a film with music, through music, about music. It has that particular graph of rhythm, intensity, and pulse that we know from any stadium rock concert; the same spacing out of peaks and lows, the same introductory teasers to scenes as to songs, the same accumulative balance of lyric ballads and raunchy showstoppers – transposed to a level of dramaturgy.

Prince's 1984 movie debut seems more like his deification, with an aggressively stupid plot line (supposedly autobiographical, but if that's true, Prince must have grown up in a retirement community for burned-out screenwriters) that serves only to set him up as a paragon of artistic integrity, sexual prowess, and superhuman sensitivity.