Review Summary

These days, and not for the first time, it seems as if everyone wants to be Bob Dylan. There are the half-dozen impersonators in Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There,” soon to be followed by John C. Reilly in a few scenes of “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” and behind them there are several generations of guitar strummers and harmonica blowers Dylanizing in the streets and subway tunnels of every major city in the world. All of which makes the appearance of “The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965” especially welcome. If you were not at the Newport Folk Festival in the ’60s — or, for that matter, if you were — “The Other Side of the Mirror” places you in perfect seats, out of the sun and wind and without any extraneous contextualization. It’s a remarkably pure and powerful documentary, partly because it’s so simple. The sound mix is crisp, the black-and-white photography is lovely, and the songs, above all, can be heard in all their earnest, enigmatic glory, performed by an artist whose gifts are at once mysterious and self-evident. — A. O. Scott, The New York Times