Until the Light Takes Us (2008) NYT Critics' Pick

[lsanderson]

The Music of Church Burning
By MIKE HALE
Published: December 4, 2009

Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s absorbing, low-key documentary “Until the Light Takes Us” recounts how a few Norwegian musicians hijacked an obscure offshoot of heavy metal and made it world famous, by moving from clown paint and anti-Christian imagery into vandalism, church burning and killing. Between interviews, it illustrates the Norwegian context — cold and dark, liberal but ultra-conformist, increasingly globalized — in which these diffident, smart, polite young men came to feel alienated and racially and culturally oppressed. More