Jerry Travers  (Fred Astaire) is a world-renowned dancer and performer who has quietly made his way to London, where he has been hired to be the star of a new revue by theatre impresario, Horace Hardwick (Edward Everett Horton), who is very excited to have a major American performer as the lead in his show,…

Musical films tend to be a gateway genre into more serious forms of cinema, since many of us grew up being enchanted by the singing and dancing of colourful characters who were normally animated, and there to provide us with a bridge from the earliest days of consuming film, to when we are fully aware…

We’d all be privileged to know exactly what resided in the mind of Jacques Demy – I don’t think there are many filmmakers who placed as significant emphasis on both style and substance as him, with his films always being marvellous examples of both beautiful form and incredibly-compelling stories that traverse genres and conventions to…

J. Pierrepont Finch (Robert Morse) is a humble window-washer that stumbles upon a book that answers all the burning questions that he’s been asking himself for years, mainly “how to succeed in business” – this quick guide to climbing the corporate ladder becomes a sacred text to the ambitious young upstart, who follows the rules…

Jacques Demy was a profoundly fascinating figure when it came to his directorial output. One of the defining figures of the French New Wave, he never quite stood in the same thematic territory as some of his contemporaries, with his work being incredibly unique, and idiosyncratic to the point where no filmmaker has ever managed…

Like any art form, cinema tends to oscillate between trends, with new ideas replacing the old, which subsequently go out of fashion, and either resurface as loving throwbacks to the past or disappearing completely, being remnants of a past era, where the popularity of that genre or set of conventions can never be fully replicated…

“I remember the time I knew what happiness was” – “Memory”, Cats Look what the cat dragged in: utter garbage. There are few things I regret more in my life than watching Cats. I do wonder when Auguste and Louis Lumière patented the cinematograph, that they knew that their work would one day result in…

It’s always a wonderful experience to watch a well-known classic for the first time. Of the innumerable cinematic blindspots I readily admit to never having watched, Cabaret was one that was burgeoning for my attention, which was resolved recently. The danger with such a classic is that expectations will always be astronomically high, and the…

Dreams and ambitions are very important to each and every one of us, no matter what they are. All of us has, at some point, yearned to achieve something, and even if we didn’t do anything in particular to work towards that dream, they remained a motivating factor in our lives. Wild Rose is a…

Everyone has that one artistic hero, the person who inspires, moves and motivates them, and has helped them through the most difficult times in their lives. Often, this individual takes the form of a musician, a figure that makes use of the universal language of music to tell their story and inspire the lives of…