The Song Remains the Same: Led Zeppelin in Concert (1976)

This is a mediocre movie, but Led Zeppelin was a great band if you liked their headbanger heavy metal sound. When I saw that this live concert at Madison Square Garden took place in 1973, the year I graduated from high school, I thought a blast from the past would be interesting. But concert movies are tricky. In a sense you get the worst of both worlds — you are not, in fact, present at a live concert, but watching it second hand, and the quality of the music doesn't compare to the studio recordings we're used to from CDs. There's no narration in this film, and really no narrative. By today's standards the technology is forty years old. We learn nothing from or about the band. But for those of that generation like me, it was still fun to watch a band that defined a generation (and sold 300 million albums) with songs like "Stairway to Heaven," "Whole Lotta Love," "Heartbreaker," and "Dazed and Confused" — Jimmy Page on what the film hails as "the electric guitar," Robert Plant (vocals), John Paul Jones (bass guitar, keyboards) and John Bonham (drums).