Control (2007)

Control is special because it treats a rock biography less like a highlight reel and more like a haunting piece of lived-in memory—shot in stark, gorgeous black-and-white that feels like the music looks. Anton Corbijn directs with a photographer’s eye and a humanist’s patience, letting small domestic moments, backstage silences, and sudden bursts of performance carry the ache without turning it into melodrama. Sam Riley is quietly astonishing as Ian Curtis, capturing both the magnetism that pulls a room toward him and the fragility that keeps slipping out of his grasp, while Samantha Morton gives the story its bruised, grounding heartbeat. It’s an intimate, somber film with flashes of bleak humor and raw energy, and while the subject matter is heavy and the ending is no secret, the journey is so beautifully observed that it feels less like watching tragedy and more like understanding a life.

Control is clearly aiming for an intimate, respectful portrait of Ian Curtis and the quiet suffocation of fame, illness, and fractured relationships, and Anton Corbijn shoots it with a stark, period-authentic mood that feels true to the band’s world. The catch is that it’s deliberately subdued: the pacing can feel slow, the storytelling keeps you at arm’s length, and if you’re expecting a punchy “rise-and-fall” music biopic or lots of electrifying concert highs, you may find it emotionally distant. It also doesn’t always translate Curtis’s wider cultural significance into something a non–Joy Division devotee will automatically feel, so it can play more like a somber observation than a revelation. Still, Sam Riley is quietly compelling, the performances are grounded, and if you’re in the mood for a bleak, controlled character study rather than a crowd-pleasing rock movie, it delivers exactly that.