“Coming Home is intimate, offbeat, sometimes awkward and bumbling, but ultimately very moving”
“This could quite easily have added up to a rather distasteful documentary: an attempt to control the narrative by his loved ones; an attempt to capitalise on a megastar’s death via a serendipitous TV commission; the repurposing of a dead man’s words to schmaltzy effect. But somehow it doesn’t feel cheap. Don’t go into this programme expecting an unsanitised deep dive into Ozzy’s life and work – instead appreciate this compellingly intimate and extremely moving farewell.”
Rachel Aroesti, The Guardian
“Trust the Osbournes. Here was their documentary about a very final homecoming, about loss of health, about no longer being able to do what you were born to do, about dying … and it was funny. Initially, anyway, before the poignancy, brewing from the start under Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home, threatened to become overwhelming.”
James Jackson, The Times
“Coming Home is intimate, offbeat, sometimes awkward and bumbling, but ultimately very moving because it cannot conform to the kind of editorial stage management pioneered by the Osbournes’ original show. One moment it’s all jokes and then we are watching Ozzy’s funeral procession, with the star himself supplying philosophical voice-over narration (with subtitles for those not raised in the Midlands).”
Neil McCormick, The Telegraph
“This sweetly affectionate documentary, charting the last couple of years of his life as he and his wife prepared to leave California and return to England, was never morbid. But it didn’t shy away from mortality either.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail
“In many ways, Coming Home feels problematic and it is certainly invasive. Its focus – a famous rock star – is dealing with nothing less than his own mortality, while his family rightly crave privacy against a production crew yearning for all-access. Neither party, you sense, is happy with their compromise. As a portrait of music’s fading but most endearing Dark Lord, it is touching and tender. But perhaps this very public couple’s final moments should have remained, ultimately, private.”
Nick Duerden, The i
“What would have already been a moving film, elegantly made, on Ozzy and Sharon’s seemingly unending love and the entry into late life together, without the kids, becomes emotionally wrought in light of Ozzy’s death. All the bittersweet sadness that the Osbournes process on screen is cast with a second meaning in light of his passing; there’s a finality to it all. Still, it wouldn’t be Sharon and Ozzy’s world if we weren’t laughing. Everything that made The Osbournes so loveable is on display with the full gang back together for the last time.”
Hannah Ewens, The Independent
No comments yet