always deliver. When you watch, this cinematic choice feels absolutely perfect, the lack of cuts capturing the immediacy of the song and reflecting the fact that the musicians have no choice to cut and start again either. Oh, and the sound...Wonderfully visceral, raw and untampered with, every original recording is layered with character and charisma, the beautifully complex machine always manages to draw the very best from its chosen subject. Handled with wonderful care, romanticism and respect for the technology and the incredible talent it facilitated, the film is a viewing experience like no other and should be sought out by music fans of all tastes and ages.” Brian McCollum in the Detroit Free Press wrote that the film “brings a lost musical era back to life” and praised “a documentary which pairs a scholarly eye for detail with a buoyant fan passion.” Chris Willman in Variety praised the film for being “all about romance” and posited that “the ultimate star of this show is a meticulously reconstructed recording machine from the 1920s that seems to have talismanic qualities on those who enter its orbit even 80 years after it was last in use. This antiquated, cleaned up piece of studio equipment is so fetishistically photographed, it relegates the 19 musical acts that drop by for an old-school session to supporting players. Fortunately, it’s a stunt that pays off, in pristine contemporary recordings you can scarcely believe went directly through a cutting stylus direct to disc. Bernard MacMahon, who championed this project for the better part of this century, makes the best case for this beautiful monstrosity of a machine representing the pre-homogeneity democratization of American music.” Robert Lloyd in the Los Angeles Times confided "I don’t mind telling you I got a little emotional watching this, and you might too." Kurt Gardner in Blogcritics called the film “An amazing journey through musical history. Lovers of music and early Americana alike will be fascinated by Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty’s The American Epic Sessions. The enormous device, made of pulleys, flywheels, weights, and wood, was set up in a Los Angeles recording studio whose nondescript exterior gave no hint of the magic taking place inside. There, the film is lit in nostalgic, burnished hues, and loving close-ups of the marvelous contraption in operation are interspersed with performances by such talents as The Avett Brothers, Los Lobos, Alabama Shakes, Taj Mahal,