This review originally ran in conjunction with the film’s world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.
“Nothing Compares,” the documentary about Sinead O’Connor, is a movie that is both timely and curiously out of time. It’s a potent film that explores the roots of the brilliant but troubled Irish singer, who was back in the news recently with the suicide of her teenage son and her own hospitalization, but it also turns her recent years into an afterthought, bypassing many of the highs and lows that led her here over the last two decades.
It has an upbeat ending of sorts, painting O’Connor as a survivor who is now receiving her due, and that part necessarily felt hollow when the film premiered at Sundance the week after she went to a hospital after making her own threats of self-harm.