A front-row seat to a star's unravelling

"LOVE is a losing game," sang Amy Winehouse, the smoky-voiced North London chanteuse with the beehive hairdo, red lips and heavy eyeliner who bared her soul about a painful break-up in a best-selling album, Back to Black. In Amy, director Asif Kapadia chronicles - via a collection of grainy home videos, voice-overs from old friends, TV interviews and concert appearances - the meteoric rise and sad demise of a star who lit up the music scene, then flamed out through substance abuse.

From the moment we see her onscreen as a pimply teen in the late-1990s giving a soul queen-worthy rendition of Happy Birthday to a friend, her raw talent is apparent. By the time she died from alcohol poisoning in 2011 aged 27, Winehouse had yo-yoed her way through professional highs and personal lows, a force of nature with true presence and attitude to spare whose tendency to self-destruct turned her into tabloid fodder and the butt of jokes for callous talk-show hosts.

Amy is an intimate, ambitious and thoroughly mesmerising portrait of a young woman whose incredible voice, song-writing ability and messy personal life were irrevocably linked. To say that Winehouse could carry a tune is a bit like saying Ayrton Senna knew how to race cars.