Paul McCartney: Man on the Run

This is a lavishly assembled portrait built almost entirely from personal archive rather than after-the-fact commentary, and that choice pays off — the sense of being dropped inside a specific, turbulent stretch of one musician's life, rather than watching a clip-and-interview recap of a career, is what critics single out most consistently as the film's strength. The pacing and emotional shading are handled with real control, and the sheer volume and rarity of the footage on display does a lot of the storytelling work other documentaries have to fake with stock clips.

Where reviewers pull back is on how searching the film is willing to be. It leans toward a sympathetic, insider's-eye framing of its subject, and a few of the thornier chapters of this period get acknowledged rather than dug into — the film gestures at friction and controversy without staying with it long enough to complicate the overall picture. The result reads to some critics as handsome and assured but ultimately safe: a film more interested in mood and momentum than in interrogation.

The throughline critics agree on is a story of collapse and rebuilding — a public reinvention undertaken semi-publicly, with a domestic partnership at its center — and it's here that the film is strongest, treating that emotional arc as the real subject rather than a framing device around a music career. Most of the disagreement isn't about whether the craft is accomplished; it's about whether a film this intimately positioned with its subject was ever going to risk real friction with him.