Load of rubbish!!

A different way of telling a story

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

This review is a BIG departure from the normal horror/gore/sleaze that I review - but I must say that I'm a HUGE P-HEAD fan and am mad at myself for not coppin' this DVD earlier. As far as "live" music is concerned - I've seen literally thousands of bands live, from SLAYER to STEELY DAN - and if there is any one single band that I never got to see live and could make it happen - it'd be these guys (and girl...)...Backed by a full orchestra - PORTISHEAD does every song that you want to hear done live - and does it spot-on...period...If you're a PORTISHEAD fan - you MUST see this. Make sure to also peep the "special-features" as it showcases all of their commercially-made videos and their short film - TO KILL A DEAD MAN. If you are even a marginal P-HEAD fan - pick this joint up immediately. If I had to have any gripe about this DVD - it would be that the songs are so well done that they sound straight off of their albums. You can take that as a good or bad thing. I was hoping for a little more "improvisation" - but it didn't much happen. I also think that PORTISHEAD is deserving of a little more of a "stage-show" which this concert is not - it's a pretty straight-forward showing of them doin' what they do best - but backed with a full orchestra. In other words - even with my minor gripes - this has already become one of my "most-watched" DVD's in my collection...15/10

A unique film of a live concert. It's shot in a couple of ways; conventional, sepia filtered footage is intercut with Super 8. Rather like the music - sample-heavy, studio-based, soundscape-as-song - trying on a live outfit, the film sets itself up as both a concert document and a film-in-itself.The result is a bewildering triumph in all respects. The conceptual gamble of the orchestra and band at audience level (with no division save the dolly tracks) pays off - it feels live and genuinely intimate. Add a possessed, shamanic performance from Beth Gibbons, cocooned in the midst of the band, and we get the music like an IV shot. Watching the muted, monochromatic-filtered film was, for me, rather like looking at a painting by Mark Rothko: stripped of the clutter of context or content the experience becomes more direct.Luckily, the band don't push it. They're not above talking to the audience and the film cuts between the concert and scenes out on the street and footage both prior to and after the show. The end result is a concert that is no more than what it is, without claim or pretence. It's absorbing, oddly moving and almost insurmountably cool.

I am a Portishead freak. I doubt you would have come to this particular corner of the IMDb if you weren't either. If you have seen this tape, I'm winking as I type. If you haven't, make all the necessary, desperate attempts you can manage to make in your new life mission to get it. Beth Gibbons is like a New Age Shirley Bassey, squeezing all the OOMPH! she can out of every lyric and hissing it into the mic, she prowls Roseland with her intensity. Geoff Barrow, Adrian Utley, and Dave McDonald assist Miss Gibbons in her quest to touch souls with dead on choices. No song from either of their first two albums sound as good as they do when performed on PNYC. When assembled as one, the songs are musical paintings of relationship despair, like Beth's tragic torch songs to the boyfriend that failed to keep her. Every artistic motive is made to compensate from making a simple one shot of the band doing their thang, but in actuality, when you're dealing with what I consider (for my money) to be the greatest album of all time, all you need is a camera, an audience, and a couple of geniuses who call themselves Portishead.

This is one of the best video document of the 90's of a band.And also one of the best group...together with some other, Portishead prove in this film to be one of the most emotional, deep and liric group. Beth Gibbons is just amazing singing, able to move a rock with her voice.