Bob Smeaton -- previously known for his work on rockumentaries such as the Beatles' Anthology -- deserves substantial credit for rescuing the footage shot in 1970 for Festival Express from the vaults, and then somehow making a fairly coherent film out of it several decades later, with the help of newly shot interview segments with many of the event's principals. While it's a notable piece of rock history, however, the film itself isn't of nearly the monumental significance of the era's top festival-generated rockumentaries, such as Woodstock, Monterey Pop, Gimme Shelter, or even Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival (the last of which also had to wait more than a quarter-century before it was prepared for general release). It's more a nice, but not essential, supplement to the visual record of rock festivals in general and of some of the featured performers in particular, circa 1970. The footage of the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin is okay, but not on par with their best film clips from the era; the Band fares better, in part because there's not as much other footage of the group to serve as comparison, playing particularly well on "I Shall Be Released." Other on-stage clips -- of Buddy Guy, Sha Na Na, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and the forgotten Canadian band Mashmakhan -- are entertaining but well short of great, and the blues jam centered around Ian & Sylvia's Great Speckled Bird is disappointingly mundane. A bigger problem, perhaps, is that the non-stage footage of protesters at various venues of this Canadian traveling festival, as well as the scenes of the performers partying and jamming on the train, are a long way from compelling, though they're sporadically amusing. The shots of a train rushing down the tracks, in fact, are the main links of continuity throughout the film, indicating that the event was more interesting than it was truly historic. The more recent interview segments (often shown via a split-screen setup that shows a talking head on one side and footage from the festival on the other) do much to illuminate the proceedings, with comments by festival promoter Ken Walker, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, Sylvia Tyson of Ian & Sylvia, Buddy Guy, Eric Andersen (who's mysteriously not shown performing in the archive footage), and others.