Moulin Rouge (2001)

Baz Luhrmann’s breathlessly inventive pseudo musical is the sort of film which splits audiences down the middle. Some hated it with a passion, some just couldn’t get enough. If ever there was a Marmite of the movie world, this is it.

A musical set in 1900 Montmartre but featuring a defiantly contemporary soundtrack, to be fair, the film really has no right to work as well as it does. Ewan McGreggor and Nicole Kidman star (and sing!) as the central lovers, caught in a curiously elliptical romantic drama, fiercely proud of its melodramatic trappings, cheesy dialogue and sheer camp value. The film dares you to let it get away with its sheer audacity – and if you do, you’ll have a wonderful time.

The musical numbers, (drawing on artists as diverse as Elton John, The Police and Nirvana) are spectacularly staged with Luhrmann’s trademark exuberance, with McGreggor and Kidman acquitting themselves very well in the singing stakes, although Jim Broadbent and Richard Roxburgh almost steal the show with their excruciatingly hilarious rendition of ‘Like A Virgin’.

Probably the closest Western cinema has ever got to a Bollywood musical, Moulin Rouge isn’t so much style over substance, rather it is style as substance. Completely insane from beginning to end, of course, not that there’s anything wrong with that. (VH)