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.
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.
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.
Marie Antoinette is arguably the centerpiece 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.
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.
If anything unites Gene Kelly's classic musicals, it’s a belief that no past experience could be horrific enough to prevent you from letting loose that whole-human-race encompassing smile and falling in love with life all over again.
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.
As much as Sound of Noise is a heist film, it’s a musical too.
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.
Comrades: Almost a Love Story exquisitely captures the angst between wanting to run from and being ceaselessly borne back into your roots.
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.
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.