That would be Winehouse, in case you wondered which Amy is the subject of director Asif Kapadia's uncreatively titled documentary. (At least his previous feature, Senna, about the Formula One driver, was surname-specific.) This one's an improvement, though, in that it refines an apparent Kapadia specialty: the intense remembrance of stars who died too young. Viewing it therefore requires the morbid curiosity to rewind and re-watch a deadly downward spiral. We see the doomed chanteuse in the throes of her destructive relationships — with a responsibility-averse father, with a volatile husband, with chemicals — and hear her music remixed to highlight how it was driven by the raw power of personal-demon-indulgence. The foreknown trajectory becomes almost oppressive: A sweet moment of wide-eyed awe at seeing her idol Tony Bennett tell the world she'd won a Grammy turns bitter with the rueful backstage confession that even this experience was boring without drugs. Later, in a studio to record a duet with Bennett, Winehouse is heartbreakingly humble and hard on herself, and he understands in a profound way. Though the film feels slightly overlong and its emphases sometimes seem redundant, there remains the shock of how quickly Winehouse went from the sly, bright-eyed sprite of friends' home videos to the strung-out wretch beleaguered by fusillades of paparazzi flash bulbs. There is a pinch of cognitive dissonance from an implied condemnation of the tabloid-vulture ethos in a movie made entirely of prerecorded footage, but that's just the sadly Winehouse-less world we live in now.
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