Comrades: Almost a Love Story exquisitely captures the angst between wanting to run from and being ceaselessly borne back into your roots.
In Oscar Levant, we find more than the bridge between a man and his art. We find the bridge between the world as it is and the world we dream can come into being.
The yearning and ecstatic hope of Stephen Sondheim’s songs in Evening Primrose creates a narrative and an aesthetic that is, to my eyes, distinctly queer.
Who’s Singin’ Over There is at heart an allegory, using the platform of a road movie to ruminate on our capacity to fiddle whilst Rome burns.
As much as Sound of Noise is a heist film, it’s a musical too.
Watching Buena Vista Social Club is the only thing that feels the same as hearing my grandparents reminisce about Cuba, capturing my secondhand homesickness for an alluring place I’ve never been, but to which I’m deeply connected.
Marie Antoinette is arguably the centrepiece of Coppola’s MTV-inflected career, conceived as it was as a sort of love letter to the music and music videos she loved as a teenager.
In the center of Meghe Dhaka Tara, Ranen Roychoudhury appears as the folk singer whose slow sway and arching features evoke a quiet transcendence. His sweet, lilting cries peel back the cruelty of the melodrama and present the beating heart of Ritwik Ghatak’s humanism.
A Mighty Wind strikes a different tone than the rest of Christopher Guest’s work—the tone is softer, the caricatures more human and less cartoony, but still delightfully weird around the edges.
A Prairie Home Companion is a tender meditation on music, memory, and death that holds Robert Altman’s final goodbye inside it like a fly in amber, preserved for all who will listen.
While all of House’s music is evocative, its leitmotif is the Rosetta Stone to understanding its complex attitude toward romance, youth, and the specter of post-war Japan that looms over them.
There is much to say about Chariots of Fire—much about class and social order, about overcoming both religious prejudice and Anglo-Saxon snobbery, about stuffy British parlors and antiquated politics—but much of this, much of one’s experience of the film, is dominated by its music.
