Madonna: The Rebel Heart Tour

Unstoppable! Immeasurable! Uninhibited! A rebel! There are just too many identifiers to quantify or describe Madonna and it hardly feels like any of them do her justice. The unrelenting Mother of Reinvention has continued to elaborate on her image as often as she's pushed the limits of popular music; igniting an entire generation of copy cats that can only aspire to inhabit the surface of the career Madonna has engineered for herself.

It's only more evident the incomparable talent and vision of the pop artist when it's experienced in a live forum. When Madonna took the stage to promote her thirteenth full-length album "Rebel Heart" the world tour produced yet another benchmark for the artist. The live spectacle marked her tenth outing and undoubtedly her most elaborate. Madonna looks at these opportunities as a way to visually interpret her music mixing mediums pushing the technologies of live performance.

Her tours are blockbusters - highly anticipated; living up to expectations and "Madonna: Rebel Heart Tour" available now on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD is all you can want it to be. For those unfortunate souls who weren't able to experience the Rebel Heart Tour as it traveled across the planet in 2016 making over 80 stops, 36 alone in North America. The show grossed $168.8 million and reunited Madonna with visionary tour director Jamie King.

The production itself was recorded all around the world, first premiered as a concert special on Showtime, but this home release is re-edited and features previously unreleased footage that captures all 22 songs from the setlist, as well as unprecedented back stage access. Expertly edited and co-directed by Danny Tull and Nathan Rissman, "Madonna: Rebel Heart Tour" most prominently highlights tracks from the album it inspired, but the setlist also includes classic faves.

Not one to so heavily reflect on her past successes, Madonna takes a polish to some of her greatest hits including "Deeper and Deeper" and "Music" giving both club house dance hits a reinvention, while her signature track "Vogue" worms its way into the new track "Holy Water" playing off of the artist's often controversial examination of religion and Catholicism. Even "Like A Virgin" gets redux, a more stripped down arrangement and performance by Madonna.

After the more bombastic "MDNA Tour" of 2012, "Rebel Heart Tour" is a more beautifully crafted foray that also plays much more interestingly on the screen. Madonna couldn't help but splash a lot of backdrop imagery across many of the staged numbers to give everything more glitz, it's impossible to not succumb to the visual images, sometimes haunting, intoxicating and captured from every angle to help entice the elaborate choreography and always-suggestive moves.

During many moments Madonna evokes many of her commonly explored themes including sex, love and joy, misogyny and equality, and by the introduction of her dance anthem "Living For Love" the tone gives way to a pulse-pounding house party! It's impossible to ignore the detail given to every aspect of the show, whether it's the high fashion styling provided by the Academy Award nominated Arianne Phillips, or the attention to musical arrangements.

The high-flying acrobatics of the interlude "Illuminati" practically brings the audience onto the stage, and with cameras mounted on each one of the aerialists that teeter above the crowd, the number is easily a 360-degree juggernaut, unlike anything anyone has ever seen. "Madonna: Rebel Heart Tour" on Blu-ray gives fans the best seat in the house and is a tour de force, with bonus features, excerpts from Madonna's "Tears of a Clown" special and a CD with live tracks!

"Madonna: Rebel Heart Tour"
available now on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital HD
$22.99
www.madonna.com