The story is painfully straightforward: a nine-year-old English girl named Amy Winehouse is devastated when Dad breaks up with Mum. She takes up with boys, dabbles in drink and drugs, develops an eating disorder, and begins the slide toward disaster. What makes it noteworthy are the girl's incredible talents, both for casting her awful feelings into words and for rendering those words into astonishingly soulful song. Much has been made of her loved ones' failure to intervene, or at least intervene enough, or sooner. Director Asif Kapadia is certainly ready to point the cinematic finger — especially at Dad, who seems too weak to put his daughter's interests before those of the fame machine. But to his credit, Kapadia allows the murk of recollected events to complicate matters, and everyone gets their say. Winehouse's meeting with musical idol Tony Bennett toward the film's end is especially poignant: the old pro tries to counsel and console, but the wisdom of age can't compete with the calamities of youth. (2015) — Matthew Lickona