Woodstock

(Note: This review refers to the Blu-ray version of the DVD.)

More than just a concert film, "Woodstock" is a record of a cultural event: "Three days of peace and music," as the subtitle reads, a chronicle of both the music and the community that formed around it and lived together in peace for three days on Max Yasgur's farm. It's the music that everyone remembers, and the film is a time capsule of pop music and youth culture of the era. But the filmmakers spend almost as much time observing the audience as they do the musicians, and it charts the evolution of the event over the course of the weekend: three days in three hours. That's the dynamic that helped the film win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the reason it remains such a vital artifact 40 years later.

The original film was shot in 16 mm by a small platoon of young cameramen and blown up to 70 mm, and the editors (led by Thelma Schoonmaker and a young film school grad by the name of Martin Scorsese) crammed eight hours of footage in a three-hour film with split-screen presentations. The new edition features a longer director's cut painstakingly restored from original materials, plus "Untold Stories," 18 bonus performances from Joan Baez, Santana, the Who, Jefferson Airplane and five acts (Paul Butterfield, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Grateful Dead, Johnny Winter and Mountain) that played at Woodstock but never appeared in any film version. Also features "Woodstock: From Festival to Feature," a 76-minute collection of featurettes that chronicles the festival and the film through interviews. Exclusive to the Blu-ray release is a jukebox function to program the "Untold Stories" and BD-Live functions (for BD-Live enabled players).