Cameron Winter At Carnegie Hall Review (2026 BFI London Film Festival)
Image courtesy of Mubi
Quality concert documentaries are somewhat of a dying art. What was once a genre headlined by films such as Stop Making Sense featuring The Talking Heads is now just big, commercial artists getting a straight-to-streaming performance from their tour, nearly always cut together with no sense of rhythm, as if the editor is paid by the cut and only wants to sell the luminary. They also offer little artistic merit other than a ‘cinematic’ reconstitution of one performance that is anything but singular. A camera glued to the image of a star, in a featureless environment, with little care for the concept of a show and its spectators.
On December 11th, 2025, Brooklyn-born Geese frontman Cameron Winter had his back to a sold-out audience as he performed a solo concert at the legendary New York venue, Carnegie Hall. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and co-produced by Benny Safdie, this documentary, titled simply Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall, works best when aided by the cosiness of its celluloid form, capturing the sweetness of a homecoming for Winter, who, to be honest, is not a big household name at all, yet the film holds the venue in even higher esteem, cleverly elevating the identity of the singer.
We open with quick establishing shots of bustling Manhattan streets and the exchange of tickets in a box office, before our crowd appears in a jump cut and our main man takes centre stage. This concert sees Winter perform 12 songs from his solo album, but here, they are stripped down to the sound of his voice and his ability on the piano. PTA’s sense of adventure springs to life when he is able to incorporate the audience with the setting’s shifting lighting. Some moments leave us in almost complete darkness, as the visual and audible static of the film’s 16mm and 35mm, and the delicacy of the keys, really begin to take over.
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There’s a real understanding of intimacy in here, especially given the non-fictional nature of it too; the warm winter feel of its lights line the void of the hall’s darker moments, with glowing window panes, silhouetting audience members as they watch on, faceless. I enjoy how PTA gets closer to Winter as this thing progresses; there’s a hesitant distance at first that is soon replaced by clearer portraits of the artists’ faces, juxtaposed with the frantic crowd zooms, refusing to stay in focus.
Whilst watching this, I couldn’t help but think about the traditional nature of everything here, and not necessarily in a bad way. The hall’s status is one thing, but the formal environment leads to a notable lack of phones being drawn out and held up to capture such an event. There’s a faint immortalisation effect that comes with that; the pseudo-cinematic concert doc is alive because people spend their entire time thinking behind their own camera, trying to capture the memory forever, in their own documenting way, so the futility of the commercial products that follow falls short because there is nothing new or imaginative to offer per se.
Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall functions because the events of it feel fresh to the many eyes that will perceive it; stripped of contemporary media associated with the average concert, yet still very much of now.
★★★★
Playing at the BFI London Film Festival on 7th, 8th and 15th October / Cameron Winter / Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson / Mubi
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