| 100 |
Chicago Tribune
A 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.
|
| 90 |
Newsweek
Luhrmann 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.”
|
| 90 |
Washington Post
It's a wonderful postmodern hug of a movie, and never once do you not know you're watching a movie.
|
| 90 |
New Times (L.A.)
This thing moves brilliantly, sparkling like nothing we've seen domestically since "The Wiz" or "Xanadu."
|
| 89 |
Austin Chronicle
A crazed, lovestruck, wholly original (and yet amazingly referential) beast, part pop-culture wasteland, part glowing tribute, and part wild-eyed roller coaster (of love).
|
| 88 |
New York Daily News
An audacious, snappy visual and emotional feast of dishes both familiar and fresh. It's the first really good movie of 2001.
|
| 88 |
Chicago Sun-Times
The movie is all color and music, sound and motion, kinetic energy, broad strokes, operatic excess.
|
| 80 |
Variety
A tour de force of artifice, a dazzling pastiche of musical and visual elements at the service of a blatantly artificial story.
|
| 80 |
Salon.com
It's a mishmash of decoration, drapery and debauchery that's both deeply pleasurable and kitschy.
|
| 80 |
Time
The film dances; the heart sings.
|
| 80 |
Film Threat
What ultimately comes through is an undeniably imaginative work that is a glorious testament to the limitless and largely untapped possibilities of cinema.
|
| 75 |
New York Post
A sometimes glorious, sometimes disastrous folly.
|
| 75 |
Christian Science Monitor
Some will find it exhilarating fun.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
A movie so cheeky, aggressive and bursting with vitality that it can't help being annoying and exhilarating at the same time.
|
| 75 |
Miami Herald
It'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.
|
| 75 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
You get faux feelings -- but faux of the highest, giddiest order.
|
| 70 |
Los Angeles Times
You can go with it or resist it, be exhilarated or worn out. But forgetting the experience is not one of your options.
|
| 70 |
Rolling Stone
The grand becomes grandiose and the lyrical turns bombastic.
|
| 70 |
Wall Street Journal
A movie you can't readily get out of your head.
|
| 70 |
Washington Post
McGregor, 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.
|
| 67 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
It doesn't, as they say, really work -- but it's enjoyable enough in spots to leave one feeling passably entertained.
|
| 67 |
Entertainment Weekly
The result is a musical that substitutes irony for pop passion, misanthropic disjointedness for lyrical flow.
|
| 60 |
Film.com
Consistently runs the danger of substituting cool but ultra-hyper, modern special effects for boring old human sentiment.
|
| 60 |
Mr. Showbiz
It's the kind of flourish that makes you smile -- that makes you believe in the power of movies.
|
| 60 |
The New York Times
Simultaneously stirring and dispiriting.
|
| 60 |
Chicago Reader
Diverting, energetic, and even reasonably satisfying, so long as you aren't looking for a real musical to take its place.
|
| 50 |
TV Guide
Never boring, often excruciating and occasionally transcendent.
|
| 50 |
Baltimore Sun
It wants to be like no other movie you've ever seen. It's more like every movie you've ever seen.
|
| 50 |
LA Weekly
Drowns in baroque mise en scène camp, frenetic musical numbers and a precious dialogue conceit that wears out its welcome very fast.
|
| 50 |
Boston Globe
The 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.
|
| 40 |
New York Magazine
It's like being trapped inside a fever dream of Oscar-night production numbers.
|
| 40 |
Village Voice
A voracious vacuum cleaner of a movie --hoovering up a hundred years' worth of junk with the same monotonously unmodulated hum.
|
| 38 |
USA Today
May be a spectacularly awful movie, but it's also spectacularly drenched in color, décor and other visual oh-la-la.
|
| 38 |
Charlotte Observer
The 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.
|
| 30 |
Slate
Ends up leaving you starved for a single moment of unhyped emotion. You can barely see the characters for Luhrmann screaming.
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