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100A landmark musical movie -- controversial, mercurial, even cheeky. It's the kind of film that wildly divides audiences and critics -- people tend to either love or hate it. I loved it.
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90Luhrmann has raised the level of his game, deconstructing the Hollywood musical -- a genre all but left for dead -- and reassembling it with a potency that hasn’t been seen since “Cabaret.”
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90It's a wonderful postmodern hug of a movie, and never once do you not know you're watching a movie.
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90This thing moves brilliantly, sparkling like nothing we've seen domestically since "The Wiz" or "Xanadu."
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89A crazed, lovestruck, wholly original (and yet amazingly referential) beast, part pop-culture wasteland, part glowing tribute, and part wild-eyed roller coaster (of love).
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88The movie is all color and music, sound and motion, kinetic energy, broad strokes, operatic excess.
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88An audacious, snappy visual and emotional feast of dishes both familiar and fresh. It's the first really good movie of 2001.
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80What ultimately comes through is an undeniably imaginative work that is a glorious testament to the limitless and largely untapped possibilities of cinema.
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80It's a mishmash of decoration, drapery and debauchery that's both deeply pleasurable and kitschy.
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80The film dances; the heart sings.
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80A tour de force of artifice, a dazzling pastiche of musical and visual elements at the service of a blatantly artificial story.
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75Some will find it exhilarating fun.
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75It's impossible to watch this beautifully chaotic, excessive movie impassively. You'll either embrace what Luhrmann has done here or run out of the theater, holding your head.
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75A sometimes glorious, sometimes disastrous folly.
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75You get faux feelings -- but faux of the highest, giddiest order.
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75A movie so cheeky, aggressive and bursting with vitality that it can't help being annoying and exhilarating at the same time.
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70The grand becomes grandiose and the lyrical turns bombastic.
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70You can go with it or resist it, be exhilarated or worn out. But forgetting the experience is not one of your options.
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70A movie you can't readily get out of your head.
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70McGregor, the movie's most engaging performer, is convincing enough to sell the mutual attraction. The "Trainspotting" star is usually playing some kind of freak, and this is a nice stretch for him.
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67The result is a musical that substitutes irony for pop passion, misanthropic disjointedness for lyrical flow.
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67It doesn't, as they say, really work -- but it's enjoyable enough in spots to leave one feeling passably entertained.
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60It's the kind of flourish that makes you smile -- that makes you believe in the power of movies.
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60Consistently runs the danger of substituting cool but ultra-hyper, modern special effects for boring old human sentiment.
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60Simultaneously stirring and dispiriting.
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60Diverting, energetic, and even reasonably satisfying, so long as you aren't looking for a real musical to take its place.
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50The film musical is at the moment an even more devitalized art form than the Broadway musical. But Moulin Rouge doesn't revive it. It only rearranges the bones.
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50It wants to be like no other movie you've ever seen. It's more like every movie you've ever seen.
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50Never boring, often excruciating and occasionally transcendent.
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50Drowns in baroque mise en scène camp, frenetic musical numbers and a precious dialogue conceit that wears out its welcome very fast.
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40It's like being trapped inside a fever dream of Oscar-night production numbers.
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40A voracious vacuum cleaner of a movie --hoovering up a hundred years' worth of junk with the same monotonously unmodulated hum.
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38May be a spectacularly awful movie, but it's also spectacularly drenched in color, décor and other visual oh-la-la.
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38The picture brims over with ideas - good ones, silly ones, maudlin ones, witty ones, absurd ones - and they bump up against each other like ingredients in a vast stewpot that never comes to a continuous boil.
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30Ends up leaving you starved for a single moment of unhyped emotion. You can barely see the characters for Luhrmann screaming.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 235 out of 271
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Mixed: 7 out of 271
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Negative: 29 out of 271
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