The Boy Friend is ingenious filmmaking. Dry and literate, it does for 20s/30s musicals what Day for Night did for New Wave arthouse: both films simultaneously dissecting and epitomizing their subjects. This film is a robustly cloying masterpiece operating in effervescent communion with the world of Busby Berkeley and of Ruby Keeler, surprising you with each consecutive set-piece's ability to define and defy yet another convention of stage and/or screen all while elevating its source material. Rattlingly tuneful, effortlessly funny,…

Twenty years after the cancellation of the brilliant The Adventures of Robin and Marian TV series (unceremoniously taken off air half-way through its second season; all episodes, shot on video, were tragically junked by the network in the late 60s), Robin and Marian, a long-awaited, one-off revival special (thereafter labelled by diehards as 'The TV Movie') aired quietly, but far from unnoticed, one Sunday night (on a different network) in the late autumn of 1976. Miraculously reuniting all of the…

Truly disappointing as an opera fan and an Argento fan. Other folks see the film's unpleasantness as a virtue but I can't abide those vulgar heavy metal needle drops (by contrast, the decision to play Rick Astley within 30 seconds of Maria Callas' Violetta is divinely tasteful).

Verdi's Macbeth is such an inert opera (TBH, the staging here is a dream compared to the bland nonsense ones I've seen of it lately; also, why does no one in the cast…