Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace (2018) is the concert documentary you can watch online on iFILM, capturing Aretha Franklin at the height of her powers. Across two January nights in 1972 she cut her bestselling gospel album live — not in a studio, but inside a Baptist church in Los Angeles.

There are no talking heads and no narration. Backed by the Southern California Community Choir and Reverend James Cleveland at the piano, Franklin works through hymn after hymn while the New Temple congregation weeps and shouts her on. Sydney Pollack's cameras crowd the aisles; somewhere in the pews sit Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts.

The footage stayed locked away for more than forty years because Pollack's crew never synced the sound to the picture, and he died before the problem was solved. Producer Alan Elliott finally finished it. What you get is not a career retrospective but the raw act of a classic record being made. Stream Amazing Grace online on iFILM.