Enduring rock band U2 has been the subject of many documentaries, but Davis Guggenheim’s new film “From the Sky Down” stands among the best. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly magazine filed the following review.

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Guggenheim, who made “An Inconvenient Truth,” looks at U2's career through the lens of its most dramatic transformational moment: the recording of “Achtung Baby,” starting late in 1990. The film captures how a moment like that one doesn’t simply happen. The band members didn’t just wake up one day and say, “Hey, let’s rebrand!” In fact, Bono and the Edge knew that they’d pushed their politics and their sound as far as it could go, and they couldn’t just keep doing it anymore.

To get away from what it had been, U2 went to Berlin to the fabled Hansa Tonstudio, where David Bowie recorded “Heroes.” The band literally arrived in the city on the last flight before the reunification of Germany. The question was, could U2 reunify itself?

In “From the Sky Down,” the band members return to that studio to relive what happened. The sequence in which we see them invent the song “One” is as revelatory a moment as I’ve ever seen in a rock doc.

The movie looks at a lot more, like what it felt like for U2 to play stadiums when they knew they couldn’t fill that space or a fascinating segment in which the band members own up to the debacle that was “Rattle and Hum.”

If “Achtung Baby” had never gotten made and the band had imploded, music would have gone on. Yet U2, for a long time now, have stood tall as perhaps the last band of their era who fully incarnate the romance, the majesty of rock and roll. “From the Sky Down” is a stirring testament to what it really means when four people in this world can create magical things because they band together.