The director and the guitarist grew shut, particularly throughout postproduction, and fairly quickly they have been dwelling collectively and jetting off to events in Paris or Rome. That closeness brought on friction: Regardless of the approval for “The Final Waltz,” some members of the Band felt that Robertson had made the movie about him, somewhat than about them.

The drummer Levon Helm, whose superlatively soulful voice electrifies “The Evening They Drove Previous Dixie Down” and “Up on Cripple Creek,” made these criticisms public with the 1993 publication of his memoir “This Wheel’s on Fireplace.” He referred to as the film “a catastrophe” and accused Scorsese of creating Robertson look nice whereas ignoring different band members.

By then, Robertson and Helm had arrived at very totally different ranges of success and monetary consolation. “Robbie gained. Levon misplaced,” Ken Gordon wrote in a 2015 essay in The Bitter Southerner. Some folks reflexively aspect with winners, others with losers, and after Helm’s guide got here out, Robertson’s popularity suffered in some circles, and probably influenced subsequent evaluations of “The Final Waltz,” particularly after it was rereleased in theaters and on DVD in 2002.

“The film’s actual topic just isn’t the Band as a complete, however Robbie Robertson,” Stephen E. Severn wrote in Movie Quarterly, including that “nearly each visible and thematic facet of ‘The Final Waltz’ is designed to showcase his abilities on the expense of the opposite members of the group.” Nonetheless, Severn affirms that it “could also be the most effective movie ever made concerning the music scene,” one which, unwittingly or not, reveals the cutthroat nature of the enterprise.

Practically 25 years after the discharge of “The Final Waltz,” its placement on lists of the most effective music documentaries was so widespread that the consensus across the movie was ripe for a problem. “‘The Final Waltz’ has inexplicably been referred to as the best rock documentary of all time,” Roger Ebert wrote in 2002. In a re-evaluation of the film that very same 12 months, Elvis Mitchell wrote in The New York Occasions that “a part of the pleasure is in watching Robbie Robertson, the group’s chief, seduce Mr. Scorsese.”

The film is extra skeptically understood now, however its stature has by no means waned. Even its stoutest opponents acknowledge its high quality. “Critics referred to as the film the most effective and most luxurious movie ever made a couple of rock live performance,” Levon Helm wrote grumpily in his guide, “and I suppose that’s true.”