“Everyone say amen for the technical difficulties … give the technician a big hand for the difficulties.”

Aretha murdered the audience, then the choir, then the band leader, and the movie’s only half over. The choir leader (who is named Alexander Hamilton) survived. Please give everyone in this church a bottle of water.

Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope:

Franklin conceived the album as a return to her spiritual roots (her father, also a reverend, delivers a moving speech in the last quarter of the movie), and one of the reasons she set out to record it live rather than in a studio was to capture that feeling which could only be generated by audience participation. Apart from being a musical document of the highest order, Amazing Grace emerges as a skillful orchestration of communal rapture.

Max Goldberg, 13 issues later:

Whatever they say, the music documentary gets jittery in the face of actual music. Perhaps it’s not so surprising: the most potent element of the movie — in some real sense its reason for being — is the one thing the filmmaker had no part in. Is it so hard to imagine this situation creating ambivalence, even anxiety? The film needs to do something, so it cuts … For me, the story of Amazing Grace serves as a kind of parable, articulating our wildest hopes for the music documentary: to bring sound and image back into alignment, to make the music whole again.