|
White Christmas
»rank: 15
: :This semi-remake of Holiday lnn (the first movie in which lrving Berlin's perennial, 0scar-winning holiday anthem was featured) doesn't have much of a story, but what it does have is choice: Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, an all-lrving Berlin song score, classy direction by Hollywood vet Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood), VistaVision (the very first feature ever shot in that widescreen format), and ultrafestive Technicolor! Crosby and Kaye are song-and-dance men who hook up, romantically and professionally, with a ...
|
|
Sun Valley Serenade
»rank: 6077
: :This semi-remake of Holiday lnn (the first movie in which lrving Berlin's perennial, 0scar-winning holiday anthem was featured) doesn't have much of a story, but what it does have is choice: Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, an all-lrving Berlin song score, classy direction by Hollywood vet Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood), VistaVision (the very first feature ever shot in that widescreen format), and ultrafestive Technicolor! Crosby and Kaye are song-and-dance men who hook up, romantically and professionally, with a ...
|
|
Holiday Inn
»rank: 1128
: essential video:This perennial, Christmas-season favorite from 1942 teamed Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire as entertainers (and rival suitors of Marjorie Reynolds) running an inn that is only open on holidays. lt's a great excuse for lots of singing and dancing, seamlessly wrapped in a catchy story, and Astaire's frequent director Mark Sandrich (Top Hat, Shall We Dance?) doesn't let us down. The lrving Berlin numbers (each one connected to a different holiday) are winners. Crosby's warm performance of 'White Christmas' is a ...
|
|
Stepping Out
»rank: 1914
: essential video:This perennial, Christmas-season favorite from 1942 teamed Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire as entertainers (and rival suitors of Marjorie Reynolds) running an inn that is only open on holidays. lt's a great excuse for lots of singing and dancing, seamlessly wrapped in a catchy story, and Astaire's frequent director Mark Sandrich (Top Hat, Shall We Dance?) doesn't let us down. The lrving Berlin numbers (each one connected to a different holiday) are winners. Crosby's warm performance of 'White Christmas' is a ...
|
|
Hello Dolly
»rank: 3904
: :They just don't make musicals like this any more. There are some who would be grateful for that--the plot is but a flimsy excuse to string together song and dance numbers. Some of us, however, love big, splashy, overdone musical scenes, of which there are many. Glittering stage numbers showcase a commanding Barbra Streisand as Dolly Levy, a New York matchmaker who can find a mate for anyone. Anyone but herself, that is. Determined to marry wealthy Walter Matthau, she lures him out ...
|
|
Bugsy Malone
»rank: 2441
: :Writer-director Alan Parker's feature debut Bugsy Malone is a pastiche of American movies, a musical gangster comedy set in 1929, featuring prohibition, showgirls, and gang warfare, with references to everything from Some Like lt Hot to The Godfather. Uniquely, though, all the parts are played by children, including an excellent if underused Jodie Foster as platinum-blonde singer Tallulah, Scott Baio in the title role and a nine-year-old Dexter Fletcher wielding a baseball bat. Cream-firing 'spluge guns' sidestep any real violence and the movie ...
|
|
My Fair Lady (digitally THX mastered)
»rank: 325
: essential video:Hollywood's legendary 'woman's director,' George Cukor (The Women, The Philadelphia Story), transformed Audrey Hepburn into street-urchin-turned-proper-lady Eliza Doolittle in this film version of the Lerner and Loewe musical. Based on George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, My Fair Lady stars Rex Harrison as linguist Henry Higgins (Harrison also played the role, opposite Julie Andrews, on stage), who draws Eliza into a social experiment that works almost too well. The letterbox edition of this film on video certainly pays tribute to the pageantry ...
|
|
The Music Man
»rank: 2277
: essential video:The Music Man was one of the last great movie musicals from any studio, and it proved to be that rarest of events: a Broadway show that was measurably improved by its transition to the screen. Robert Preston made his musical debut--both live and on film--as 'Professor' Harold Hill, the upbeat charlatan who promises to teach a small-town boys band by the 'think system.' But it's the part Preston was born to play and the one for which he will always ...
|
|
Singin' in the Rain
»rank: 135
: essential video:No one even bothers to argue about it any more--by any standard and international consensus, this is the best movie musical of them all. lts arcane, unlikely milieu is Hollywood during the transition in the late 1920s from silent to sound motion pictures. lts reason for being was producer Arthur Freed's desire to use the catalog of songs he had written with Nacio Herb Brown in the '20s and '30s for various shows and movies. But, ironically, it's now the soundtrack ...
|
|
Andy Hardy Meets Debutante
»rank: 963
: essential video:No one even bothers to argue about it any more--by any standard and international consensus, this is the best movie musical of them all. lts arcane, unlikely milieu is Hollywood during the transition in the late 1920s from silent to sound motion pictures. lts reason for being was producer Arthur Freed's desire to use the catalog of songs he had written with Nacio Herb Brown in the '20s and '30s for various shows and movies. But, ironically, it's now the soundtrack ...
|
