The Greatest Movie Musicals
Every movie musical reviewed on this site, ranked. Astaire and Rogers, Bernstein and Sondheim, two Fosse films about self-destruction, and a De Palma rock opera nobody saw.
Tag: Music
Musicians and bands on the working life behind the stage, told by people who lived it.
1980sTimes Square (1980) Review
Times Square (1980) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two teenage girls live rough in pre-cleanup Times Square and form a band, in a film that was recut against its director's wishes, had a relationship removed from…
2010sJudy (2019) Review
Judy (2019) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Renee Zellweger won Best Actress for a technically accomplished transformation inside a film that exists to contain it, covering Judy Garland's five-week London run five months before her death.
2020sElvis (2022) Review
Elvis (2022) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Austin Butler is genuinely extraordinary and the film around him is narrated by his manager, edited at about four cuts a second for the first hour, and structured as…
1960sThe Magnificent Seven (1960) Review
The Magnificent Seven (1960) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Kurosawa's Seven Samurai relocated to the Mexican border, shortened by an hour, and improved in one specific way. Every gunman gets an introduction that is also an…
1980sSilverado (1985) Review
Silverado (1985) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Lawrence Kasdan made a Western in a decade that had stopped making them, assembled four leads before any of them were famous, and built it out of every convention…
1980sLonesome Dove (1989) Review
Lonesome Dove (1989) rates 10 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Six and a half hours of television that does what almost no Western film has room for, which is to follow a cattle drive long enough that the…
2000sInto the Wild (2007) Review
Into the Wild (2007) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Sean Penn adapts Krakauer's account of Chris McCandless walking into Alaska and dying there, and the film admires him considerably more than the book does. Hal Holbrook…
1970sFive Easy Pieces (1970) Review
Five Easy Pieces (1970) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A concert pianist is working an oil rig and pretending he never had another life. The diner scene is the most quoted and the least representative thing…
1960sEasy Rider (1969) Review
Easy Rider (1969) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. It invented the modern road movie and killed the counterculture's mythology in the same hundred minutes. The film is loose, self-indulgent and occasionally incoherent, and the ending is…
1990sStar Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999) Review
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Lucas had not directed a film in twenty-two years, owned the company outright, and answered to nobody. The result opens with a trade dispute, gives…
Grief and LossFrom the Renaissance Faire to the Drum Circle: A Tribute to Vernon Lewis
Vernon Lewis was a drummer who showed up at Renaissance Faires and drum circles around Southern California, and he had a gift for drawing people into the music without ever asking them to come. This is the story of how…