One Direction: Where We Are - The Concert Film

A concert film from One Direction's 2014 Where We Are tour, shot at the San Siro stadium in Milan, with short segments of the band talking between numbers. Paul Dugdale directs. The tour itself was a threshold: One Direction was the first contemporary boy band to move to stadium scale, and Where We Are was recorded as one of the highest grossing tours a group had done. The film exists to document that scale. How it was shown is also a marker of the period. It did not get a normal release; it played in cinemas worldwide for a single weekend and was then withdrawn. That limited window was used often for music films in those years and produced high takings quickly. Its value now is as a record. Zayn Malik left the band a few months after this tour and One Direction never performed as those five again. This is the last comprehensive footage of that line up at stadium scale. Dugdale works in concert film; he made comparable pieces for Adele, The Rolling Stones and Coldplay in the same period. Who it is for: the band's listeners and anyone who likes stadium concert films. Who it is not for: the camera language is purely functional and the interview segments are thin. If the music does not interest you there is nothing here.