Metacritic reviews

Squaring the Circle is a gripping true story told with towering visual panache.

With Squaring The Circle, Anton Corbijn continues mining the musical past to celebrate his unsung heroes. In this case, he uses the documentary to explore artwork pioneers Hipgnosis, who made history with their innovative approach to album cover design.

Unpretentious and unassuming, but effective, Corbijn creates his own cozy, sleeve for these trailblazers to get their due and creates a must-watch for rockologists everywhere in the process.

[Corbijn's] creation of this delightful doc as an acolyte, if hardly copycat, will be a boon for an audience that grew up pondering the mysteries of the twisted monolith on Zeppelin’s “Presence” cover; LP porn, if we can call it that, could come to no finer culmination.

A treat for anyone with a taste for rock, for rock imagery and for the glories that can be found in that piece of cardboard wrapped around a record. Anton Corbijn knows those glories well, so his movie’s got a good beat and a good look.

Before the heartbreak, there are outlandish and often funny stories about iconic album covers.

It's a standard talking head documentary with plenty of archival footage, as well as some cool, animated interstitials to introduce the album artwork being discussed. But it's the stories from the fathers (hell, they're even grandfathers now) of classic rock and roll, combined with insights from Hipgnosis, that make this a fascinating film.

Corbijn has an obsessive eye, and it suits the detail-crazy methods of Powell and Thorgerson.

What Corbijn lacks in filmmaking panache here he makes up with strong journalistic chops: These interviews are great.

Squaring the Circle is slick and enjoyable enough, but it is also, like the company it chronicles, something of a boutique item, and the reminiscences grow faintly monotonous after a while.