Brightlyme i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

Stoutor It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Phillida Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Christopher Culver Has a film ever combined one theme of such wide popular appeal with another that will interest only a small crowd and simply baffle that big popular audience? Jean-Luc Godard's SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL would delight one set of viewers and infuriate another. How does one even give a star rating to this? In May 1968, Jean-Luc Godard was permitted to film the Rolling Stones over several days in a London studio as they gradually fleshed out their now classic song "Sympathy for the Devil", and so one might expect simply a documentary about a rock band's creative process. However, over the last year Godard had broken ties with conventional cinema (even in its zany French New Wave form) and was now interested in using film to agitate for the Maoist philosophy that he had latched onto as the Zeitgeist for this era. Consequently, hardly have we seen the Stones at work before Godard cuts to completely different footage centered around the reading of strident political texts. Over the course of the film we repeatedly go back and forth between the Rolling Stones in the studio and political shots: Black Panthers sitting around a junkyard and advocating revolution, a woman spraypainting Maoist slogans over London walls, a comic book shop as a metaphor for American imperialism, etc.Even if the juxtaposition is jarring and indeed rather silly, the Rolling Stones portion of the film is satisfying for fans of this music. The viewer gets a sense of how the song "Sympathy for the Devil" went from merely a product of Jagger's imagination that he has to teach Keith Richards to ultimately the ample rendition with conga and backing-vocals that was finally released. Probably unbeknownst to Godard himself at the time, the film also serves as a portrait of Brian Jones' breakdown only about a year before his death: he's sometimes present in the studio, but he just sits in the corner, neglected by his bandmates and strumming a guitar that isn't even miked.The rest of the Stones, however, are clearly enjoying themselves. It's amusing how Jagger's English working-class accent, itself quite fake, immediately shifts to an imitation of some old American bluesman as soon as the recording of each take starts; rarely have I got such a vivid sense of how much blues meant to this generation of English youth. The last shot of the band in the film, presumably after recording wrapped on "Sympathy of the Devil", is a longish jam session. Another delight of this film for music lovers is that we can see in full colour how recording studios looked in the 1960s with the technology and sound insulation strategies of that era. (Everyone's smoking constantly, too. The place must have smelled like an ashtray).What, then, of the political bits? These would weird out anyone not familiar with Godard's earlier work of the late 1960s, but if one watches his films chronologically, then there is a clear progression from WEEKEND, his last relatively conventional film: again we see a breakdown of 1960s consumerist society depicted through militants holding guns versus prostrate figures red with (intentionally very fake) blood. Anne Wiazemsky, who had acted in Godard's immediately preceding films as a symbol of rebellious youth and now the director's second wife, appears as the personification "Eve Democracy". Unable to answer anything to her interlocutor's questions but "Yes" or "No", she mocks what Godard saw as the impotency of bourgeois representative democracy, where the people have no other way to effect political change except to vote for or against a candidate, a process that happens only every few years even as the nation is confronted by pressing challenges.Godard's politics during this time were wonky and it's hard to tell just how seriously he believed in Maoism, or whether the 38-year-old director was just trying on a fad to be closer to the youth. And yet, for viewers interested in history and especially this turbulent decade, the political scenes too hold a lot of interest. In the comic book shop segment, the camera pans slowly across the shelves, presenting a variety of pulp literature and pornography that is utterly forgotten today. Didactic as the scenes of the Black Panthers and Eve Democracy might be, even they can be appreciated as a time capsule of 1960s fashion thanks to their colourfully dressed characters.

Claudio Carvalho In the 60's, having as the background the rehearsal and recording of "Sympathy for the Devil" in the classic album "Beggar's Banquet" by the revolutionary bad boy Rolling Stones – Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman and Brian Jones – plus Marianne Faithful, Godard discloses other contemporary revolutionary and ideological movements – the Black Power through the Black Panthers, the feminism, the communism, the fascism - entwined with the reading of a cheap pulp political novel divided in the chapters: "The Stones Rolling; "Outside Black Novel"; "Sight and Sound"; "All About Eve"; "The Heart of Occident"; "Inside Black Syntax"; and, "Under the Stones the Beach"."Sympathy for the Devil" is another pretentious and boring mess of the uneven director Jean-Luc Godard. The narrative and the footages are awful, but fortunately I love the Stones and "Sympathy for the Devil" and it is nice to see them in the beginning of their careers; otherwise this documentary would be unbearable. My vote is three.Title (Brazil): "Sympathy for the Devil"

andy flight Caught this the other day and thought it was amazing. I loved the the way there two stories. Firstly being the stones writing sympathy for the devil, which was a revelation to watch. Throughout the film the style of the song changes, transforms mutating into what we know. That in its self was compelling.The second story follows different characters as they explore different debates on race, gender and media. What stuck me with it was the way it captured the period. A lot of the film's style and attitude is very sixties. Just look at the cars in the wrecking lot, everyone a vision of 50's colours arranged in a crazed mass on the banks of the Thames. It's hard to visualise a world like that now.This film is well worth a watch.

MARIO GAUCI This "meeting" of two of the finest artists of the 20th Century - Jean-Luc Godard and The Rolling Stones - is truly a missed opportunity. The footage of the band recording their landmark song (probably my favorite Stones track) is certainly fascinating, as we watch the initially slow musical accompaniment for the song taking shape and metamorphose into the energetic, percussion-heavy final version we're familiar with. Sadly, it's also quite apparent here that Brian Jones (who sits in his booth playing his acoustic guitar, rarely communicating with his bandmates except to ask for a cigarette and eventually disappearing altogether in the second half of the film) was slipping away fast.Unfortunately for us viewers, Godard (in full-blown "political activist" mode) unwisely intersperses the recording sessions with lots of boring stuff featuring militant black people spouting "Black Power" philosophy in a junkyard, white political activists reading their "sacred" texts in a book shop while members of the general public are made to slap two of their comrades and give the Nazi salute and, most embarrassingly of all perhaps, Godard's current wife, Anne Wiazemsky (playing Eve Democracy!) is seen being followed by a camera crew in a field and asked the most obtuse "topical" questions imaginable to which she merely answers in the affirmative or the negative! As if this wasn't enough, the film has undoubtedly the murkiest soundtrack I've ever had the misfortune to hear (so that I often had to rely on the forced Italian subtitles present on the VHS copy I was watching) and I'd bet that even Robert Altman would have objected to Godard's occasional overlapping on the soundtrack of the Stones recording, the Black Power spoutings, an anonymous narrator reading a (mercifully) hilarious pulp novel, etc. For some inexplicable reason then, the film ends on a beach where an unidentified film crew is filming a battle sequence!! Godard's original intention was to not include the song "Sympathy For The Devil" in its entirety and when producer Iain Quarrier overruled him, he jumped up on London's National Film Theater stage following a screening of the film and knocked him out! Godard's version, entitled ONE PLUS ONE, is also available on a double-feature R2 DVD including both cuts of the film but it's highly unlikely that I'll be bothering with it any time soon...