The Moment, Charli XCX's mockumentary set in an adjacent reality where she succumbs to post-Brat commercial pressures, is the most insightful movie about life as a pop star that I've seen in a long time. While there are some funny moments, Charli and director Aidan Zamiri don't go full Spinal Tap. Instead, they lean into the fever dream-like drama of being violently hurtled from the underground to the mainstream, as she was in the summer of 2024. Charli isn't so much a David Brentian butt of the joke, but a close proxy of her real self - a dry-witted, self-conscious musician who wants to maintain artistic credibility and give people what they want at the same time. We see the mechanisms of the music industry pulling her in different directions - the label execs who want to keep Brat summer churning on forever, the stylists trying to get her in a far-too-tight dress, the hyper commercial concert film director (a killer Alexander Skarsgård) intent on sanding down her edges. While the movie may have benefited from leaning a little more into the surreal and silly, it is an impressive first film from Charli, fuelled by the same vulnerability that made Brat so great.

It's also a pisstake of the kind of chaff that pop stars pump out for their fans nowadays. Many have pointed out that the earnest and OTT Brat film they portray in the movie is reminiscent of Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, which has spawned a film and a six-episode series. Swift is just one in a long line - before her, you've had the likes of Justin Bieber's Never Say Never, and One Direction: This Is Us, which were basically glorified DVD featurettes. It's been an age since a pop star actually let the cameras in and produced something real and honest.

In fact, the last truly great concert documentary might be In Bed With Madonna (called Madonna: Truth or Dare in the US), a 35-year old movie I thought about a lot during and after watching The Moment. In Bed With Madonna captures the singer, fly-on-the-wall style, at a career peak, following her through her 1990 Blond Ambition world tour. At this stage she is already the biggest female pop star on the planet, having owned the 1980s charts and tabloids (when filming picks up, she's just got out of her marriage to Sean Penn and has started dating Warren Beatty, who reluctantly features). Why exactly she would allow first-time filmmaker Alek Keshishian such unfettered access to her at that point is hard to understand now, though it probably speaks to both the relative quaintness of pre-internet celebrity culture and Madonna's absolute confidence in not coming across badly, which goes... so-so. Like The Moment, it is funny and a little bit sad, and makes pop stardom look like an isolating experience, even though both Charli and Madonna are mostly always surrounded by people.

Much of In Bed With Madonna plays out in backstage dressing rooms and hotel suites, which makes the whole thing feel genuinely intimate. At one point, Madonna begins to get changed, and you expect the camera to cut. Instead, she flashes her breasts with a laugh. She is always accepting visitors - Al Pacino and Kevin Costner come through, the latter of which Madonna shrugs off because he fails to adequately compliment her performance. "Anyone who refers to my show as 'neat' has to go," she tells the camera. Her father and brother - gruff, salt-of-the-earth types who feel like relics from her former life, pop by, too. Though she seems keen to accommodate all of their wants and needs, she doesn't seem totally comfortable with them either. At one point, a childhood friend - who, for what it's worth, Madonna seems to have asked to appear in the doc - accosts her in a busy hotel corridor, and asks her to be godmother to her fourth child. With sunglasses on and wet hair, Madonna asks for time to think about it, a little taken aback to be put on the spot. We don't quite see Madonna and Beatty's break-up, but we do get to witness a conversation that obviously precipitated it, in which he shows his disdain for the cameras. "She doesn't wanna live off-camera, much less talk," he says. Soon thereafter, we watch her flirt with a married Antonio Banderas. "There's gotta be something wrong with him," she says while reapplying her lipstick in the toilet, "he probably has a really small penis. There's no one that perfect."

Madonna's backing dancers, a troupe largely composed of gay men, feature heavily in the film. She has a close relationship with them - close enough that she gets into bed with one of them when they're naked, dares another to take his penis out in public, and performs fellatio on a glass bottle in front of a group of them (three dancers sued for invasion of privacy and fraud relating to the film; it was settled out of court). Despite all of this, there's always a sense, whether desired or not, that she is the boss - an invisible boundary that cannot be crossed, beyond which she is ultimately alone.

It's not all bleak work culture though - Madonna is fascinating and highly entertaining in the film. She's funny, brash and vulnerable in a way that feels totally impossible to imagine of a modern pop star. And the live tour footage, which is intercut throughout the doc, is a great reminder of what a colossal performer she was during that period. If The Moment made you want more from your pop stars, In Bed With Madonna will show you exactly what you're missing.

GQ stories you might have missed:

Robert Aramayo's I Swear BAFTA win was the greatest awards upset in years

Who will sing the next James Bond theme?

Unlike Game of Thrones, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms gave us room to grieve