Problem: 1. Textbook postmodernism at its worst, a relentless pastiche of pop-cultural sounds and representations sutured into the service of a cliché.
2. Simple y sencillamente la mejor película del ańo
3. It takes testicular fortitude to do a movie musical these days, but if there was any man for the job, it was Luhrmann.
4. Surely the most daring summer movie of the year -- it will no doubt be the most daring movie of any season this year.
5. This one seems to be dividing people into those who adore it and those who are indifferent. Count me among the former.
6. "Moulin Rouge" is a "very strange, enchanting" film...
7. The characters are the key here, with the performances ringing through.
8. Like its seductive protagonists, it wants to show us everything it can... but never reveals what we really want to see.
9. The new versions of these classic songs refresh the words and accentuate the harmony of their meaning.
10. In the end the soundtrack medleys all too concretely recall those old 'bouncing-ball' sing-along movies.
What is the consensus?
****
Answer: A love-it-or-hate-it experience, Moulin Rouge is all style, all giddy, over-the-top spectacle. But it's also daring in its vision and wildly original.


Problem: 1. The clever screenwriter Paul Rudnick cooks up a solid script that's both wildly funny and gently satirical.
2. Actually, the funniest parts of the movie are excerpts from the film that Cameron is originally nominated for.
3. A plain ol' enjoyable time at the movies.
4. In & Out is the screwball Philadelphia, a movie that contorts itself in order to indulge and then whitewash the core audience's perceived homophobia.
5. Forget the inevitable carping and give credit where credit is due.
6. ...an often painfully broad comedy that's rarely as entertaining (or as funny) as one might've anticipated.
7. Fast-moving and very funny.
8. If only it was gay in the old sense of the word.
9. Paul Rudnick has written scenes that will go down as classics.
10. Basically a one-joke farce that plays around with a once-delicate subject that by now is a mainstay even on TV.
What is the consensus?
****
Answer: It doesn't always find comfortable ground between broad comedy and social commentary, but lively performances -- especially from Kevin Kline and Joan Cusack -- enrich In & Out's mixture of laughs and sexual tolerance.


Problem: 1. ...a touchstone, one of those classics that infects the popular imagination to the point that it's really not necessary for most people to have actually seen it to recognize its signal moments ...
2. Fritz Lang's acute use of objects, symbols, letters, and codes to decrypt a relatively simple narrative remains as perfect an example of pure cinema in the sound era as one is likely to find.
3. This is a movie that dares to sympathize with a sick person, that risks making the monster real and us (in an era when Germany's cinema was still shellacked in canted angles and fanciful shadows).
4. Lang's film is a must-see for even a moderately ambitious film buff.
5. Few films are gripping and effective 82 years after their original release, but this one surely is.
6. The movie looms over our cinema like a hand of consequence, haunting us with its austerity and power long after others have faded from the mind.
7. You'll never look at a novelty balloon in the same way again.
8. It is a cousin to the early Hitchcock of The Lodger, and I have always found something even something faintly Ealingesque about its cynicism and satire.
9. Lang's razor-sharp dissection of crime and punishment never puts a foot wrong.
10. [VIDEO ESSAY] A precursor to the serial killer and policier genres, "M" is first and foremost a suspense thriller made all the more gripping because the identity of the killer is revealed in the first act.
What is the consensus?
****
Answer:
A landmark psychological thriller with arresting images, deep thoughts on modern society, and Peter Lorre in his finest performance.