Amy (2015)

Watching this two-hour documentary of the singer-song writer Amy Winehouse (1983–2011) is like watching the proverbial slow motion train wreck—you know you should turn away, but you keep watching, even eagerly so.  In a PBS interview, the director Asif Kapadia said he wanted the film to "humanize" Winehouse.  He does this by making the audience not only increasingly uncomfortable as we watch Winehouse self-destruct, but by intimating that we are also complicit.  We're the ones who watch her videos, buy the CDs, laugh when Jay Leno makes fun of her drug abuse, joke about the merciless paparazzi, and so on.  In one of the few tender scenes, Winehouse makes a recording with the eighty-eight-year-old Tony Bennett, who compares her talent to the likes of the jazz great Ella Fitzgerald.  Amy premiered at the 2015 Cannes film festival in May 2015.