The Band: Authorized Video Biography

For about six years, from 1968 through 1975, the Band was one of the most popular and influential rock groups in the world, their music embraced by critics (and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the public) as seriously as the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Their albums were analyzed and reviewed as intensely as any records by their one-time employer and sometime mentor Bob Dylan. And for a long time, their personalities were as recognizable individually to the casual music public as the members of the Beatles.

This film does a thorough job of documenting the super group behind such '60s and '70s classics as 'The Weight' and 'Up on Cripple Creek'. The three remaining original band members - Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, and Rick Danko - don't flinch from painful subjects like the breakup of the group in 1976 and their less-than-successful attempt to resuscitate it in the '80s. Such rock legends as Eric Clapton, George Harrison and Bob Weir provide their own perspectives.