[Given The Last Waltz's] title and subject, and Scorsese's tendency to work in an apocalyptic register, an air of Götterdämmerung hangs over The Last Waltz. This is the end of an era in popular music, one apostrophised finally by [Robbie] Robertson when he marvels that he and The Band have spent sixteen years on the road, quails before the prospect of pushing their luck any further, and then enumerates the performers, from Hank Williams through Janis Joplin to Elvis Presley, who have given their lives to the tradition. But more than this, the film is a collage of two decades of beginnings and endings, a two-hour whistle stop tour across the map of pop music, its sense of the history of its subject peculiarly internalised so that, in Scorsese's words, 'there's connective sense, but not really in terms of one thing leading to another; it...