Oliver! (review)
Charles Dickens’s mostly gloomy Oliver Twist set to music is no sillier than the French tragedy Les Miserables recast as an English-language opera, and it works just as well — that is to say, very well indeed.
based on a play
A Man for All Seasons (review)
A Man for All Seasons is a handsome production. In other words, it is staid, stern, plodding, and precise, with about as much passion as your 11th-grade history textbook.
The Sound of Music (review)
How can you tell The Sound of Music is a fantasy? Forget that it’s based on a true story. The fantasy tip-off is this: Julie Andrews plays a nun. The radiant and sweetly sexy Andrews, not that she isn’t delightful in the role, is about as believable as a nun as, say, Mel Gibson would be as the Pope.
My Fair Lady (review)
My Fair Lady — another musical from Gigi creators Lerner and Loewe — is a charming and amusing satire on the absurdity of rigid class distinctions such as were to be found in turn-of-the-century London.
West Side Story (review)
West Side Story is a brilliant updating of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the two warring families of Verona now two streets gangs of kids from two different immigrant cultures coexisting in one New York City neighborhood.
Hamlet (review)
Olivier’s take on Shakespeare’s story of madness and murder most foul is unmistakably a filmic one — with its monologues recast as internal thoughts heard in hushed voiceovers and use of dizzying camerawork to show Hamlet’s inner turmoil, this could never have worked on stage. The emotional desolation of Elsinore’s inhabitants is conveyed with a roving camera that swoops down on characters plotting or moping in huge, empty halls.
Casablanca (review)
I’d never seen Casablanca before — sure, bits and pieces here and there while channel surfing, but not as much as I thought I’d seen. And watching it at last was like a revelation. This is the ultimate movie. This is the purpose for which Hollywood invented itself. This is how good a film can be.
You Can’t Take It with You (review)
You Can’t Take It with You, an adaptation of the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, is Frank Capra’s loving and wacky paean to nonconformity. The comedy is over the top but the moral of the story is a serious one: Find in yourself the courage to do with your life what you really want to do.
Cavalcade (review)
As we approach another century’s turn, it’s educational to look back at how society dealt with the last big rollover. Cavalcade follows the fortunes and misfortunes of two Victorian families — the prosperous Marryots and the working-classes Bridgeses — from New Year’s Eve 1899 to New Year’s Eve 1932.
Grand Hotel (review)
It’s all very silly, the ultimate in Depression-era escapism: a piece of Hollywood magic that’s impossibly romantic filled with people who are impossibly elegant, bantering and wisecracking constantly. Its fascinating and diverse characters and a rather dark ending, however, give Grand Hotel more heft than any of its hellish spawn such as The Love Boat or Fantasy Island.
