Baz Luhrmann’s glittery spectacle remains as captivating as it was in 2001 thanks to a magnetic star turn from Nicole Kidman and its relentless energy
The musical is back! Again! As cinemas resume business as (sort of) usual in the latter stages of a pandemic, 2021 is being hyped as some kind of banner year for that most long-suffering of genres – one that, between the instantly legendary calamity of Cats and such lesser recent failures as The Prom, has recently been enduring a distinctly sub-golden age. Amid upcoming film versions of Dear Evan Hansen, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and Tick, Tick … Boom!, hopes are particularly high that the presumed box-office success of Jon M Chu’s In the Heights this summer and Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story at
Christmas will relegitimise the grand-scale studio musical. Less commercially minded cinephiles, meanwhile, are awaiting the return of French auteur Leos Carax, set to open the Cannes festival in July with his thrillingly strange-looking Sparks-scored extravaganza Annette.
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