David Lynch’s Hollywood horror film is casually stripped here of what seemed fathomless mystery back in 2001. Former Cahiers du Cinema editor Thierry Jousse kicks off a packed extras disc by using Lynch’s 10 clues on the original DVD case to easily decode its otherwise utterly disorienting last 30 minutes.
You must remember this. It’s December 1941, the month of Pearl Harbour. Richard Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), an American, probably a Communist, who fought Franco in Spain and ran guns to Ethiopia when Mussolini invaded, has given up the fight against fascism and become the proprietor of Rick’s Café Américain, a casino-nightclub in Casablanca, in unoccupied French Morocco.
An increasingly fractious America could take a leaf from the ravishing opening sequence of La La Land. A cross-section of drivers caught in LA freeway gridlock forsake their vehicles to become a dizzyingly frolicsome community that look capable of leaping their way to the stars. Road rage and rancour? Not for a second, just a shared belief in the buoyancy that happens when your body simply needs to dance.
That overriding vivacity proves an apt point of departure for Damien Chazelle's film, which cleaned up at Sunday night's Golden Globes (seven awards in all) and is poised to do the same at next month's Oscars. Cynics might say that Hollywood is merely honouring its own. But such a response is to undersell Chazelle's formidable ability to make a film about dreamers set in a city of dreams that leaves you floating out of the cinema as if on a cloud. An original movie musical of the likes they weren't supposed to make any more, La La Land arrives in time to be the cultural tonic needed for our troubled times: it's wise and witty but underlyingly wistful, even melancholic as well.
For that, credit the boy wonder that is Chazelle, 32 next week, whose breakout film Whiplash finds its perfect complement here. Whereas the earlier film came with a furious beat that simply would not be stilled (its Oscar-winning star, JK Simmons, gets a neat cameo this time out), La La Land has a disarming intimacy that gets under the skin. Indeed, those who associate movie musicals with canned razzmatazz that makes you wonder what these people are singing about in the first place will instead find a haunting, sometimes hilarious portrait of two creators who career towards each other only to discover that life and art don't always align. 
Those aspirants are Mia (Emma Stone), an audition-weary actress, and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a softly-spoken jazz musician she chances upon in a bar. They embark on one of those screen romances in which music and dance arise entirely naturally from personality: caught up in the emotion and heat of the moment, what other choice is there?
And with a deftness that nods to the likes of Astaire and Rogers, Jacques Demy, and (the director revealed only last week) a 1927 Janet Gaynor starrer called Seventh Heaven, Chazelle makes retro chic feel richly contemporary. After all, if the pair are going to go on a date to the Griffith Observatory - the LA planetarium - why shouldn't they also find themselves dancing high atop the city? It's magic in the moonlight, if there ever was such a phrase.
Stone had a well-received Broadway run (replacing Michelle Williams) in the recent Broadway revival of Cabaret, so her singing chops don't entirely come as a surprise. Singing "Audition (The Fools Who Dream)", which in theatre would be called the 11 o'clock number, she impresses precisely because she lacks that hard, vaguely shellacked edge that catapults many a lesser entertainer into the spotlight. By contrast, hers is a plaintive, ruminative presence in a film that believes in the sudden raptures of love but also its ruination. The Justin Hurwitz score, with lyrics by Broadway's current golden boys Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Dear Evan Hansen), is sprightly and vigorous where needed but also knows when to come to rest, and there's no equivalent of the go-for-broke power ballad that one finds with a more calculated type of movie musical such as Frozen.
And in a film which lacks many supporting characters - John Legend (pictured above) is among the few other names on view, as the leader of the band Sebastian joins - Gosling proves a debonair delight as arguably the more surprisingly cast of the two leads. (Emma Watson and Miles Teller were the first tapped to play these roles.) His withheld power and quiet charm are well suited to the Star is Born-like trajectory of a character who valiantly holds out against the smothering sameness of the culture that the film itself resists. The movie ends with a postscript that ramps up the pathos, and why not? Set in a town famous for crash landings, La La Land offers the promise that, in the right circumstances, a few do get the chance and the space to soar.
RYAN GOSLING'S FILMOGRAPHY
Blue Valentine (2010). A controversial break-up melodrama sees things from the male point of view
Drive (2011). Ryan Gosling's brilliant, bruising ride into LA darkness (pictured)
Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011). Ryan Gosling teaches Steve Carell how to score in a film that doesn't
The Ides of March (2011). George Clooney's star-packed morality tale superbly anatomises political chicanery
The Place Beyond the Pines (2013). Derek Cianfrance and Ryan Gosling follow Blue Valentine with an epic tale of cops and robbers
Gangster Squad (2013). Ruben Fleischer swaps zombies for gangsters with mixed results
Only God Forgives (2013). Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling follow Drive with a simmering tale of vengeance
The Big Short (2015). Director Adam McKay successfully makes a drama out of a crisis
The Nice Guys (2016). Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling buddy up to crack jokes, bones and crime in 70s LA
La La Land (2017). Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone (pictured above) will have you floating out of the cinema on a cloud
Tinseltown's relationship to its more sophisticated, older New York brother is analogous to Ethan Mordden's engagement by Oxford University Press. The presentation is a sober, if slim, academic tome with an austere assemblage of black-and-white photos in the middle; what we get in the text is undoubtedly erudite but also racy, gossipy, anecdotal, list-inclined, sometimes camp and a tad hit and miss.
An amplified crunch in the dark, sound without vision, kicks off this take on Moss Hart and George S Kaufman's light comedy about the advent of the talking pictures. It's a typical Richard Jones leitmotif, not as fraught with horror as the baked beans of his Wozzeck or the spinning top in his Royal Opera Boris Godunov. This, bathetically, is merely the noise of "Indian" nuts being consumed by the play's holy fool George Lewis, an idiot everyone thinks is savant. The effect is sparely operated thereafter.
Whatever one thinks of Café Society - and responses to Woody Allen's latest as ever are likely to be divided - few will dispute the visual lustre that the legendary cameraman Vittorio Storaro has brought to this tale of love upended and deferred, set in 1930s Hollywood to a period-perfect soundtrack pulsing with the music of Rodgers and Hart.
Every frame has a ready-made, natural shimmer that communicates Allen's love affair with the cinema, however one responds to a narrative about displaced nebbish Bobby Dorfman (Allen soundalike Jesse Eisenberg), who falls hard for LA glamour girl Vonnie (a radiant Kristen Stewart), a one-time Nebraskan who by the final credits has against the odds become Bobby's aunt.
That might sound like a sort of inverted commentary on Allen's much-debated personal life, but it's possible to look past the writer-director's circumstances in a story which exerts an unexpected emotional pull. The ending, set on the cusp of a new year, finds its leading players casting a ruminative, regretful glance back at their pasts.
Allen devotees, too, will note the shift in perspective between the mockery to which a sunlit, soulless Hollywood is subjected in Annie Hall and the dreamscape captured so easefully by Storaro here. With Bobby we look on in wonder at a realm in which the likes of Joan Blondell and Adolphe Menjou are only an unseen phone call or canapé away, while Bobby's gangster-brother Ben (Corey Stoll, pictured above with Saul Stein) casually cuts short the lives of all and sundry on his grubby home turf.
The boys' echt-Jewish mother Rose (Jeannie Berlin, terrific) clocks but doesn't want to address how exactly it is that Ben spends his days. That, in turn, makes the itinerant Bobby's screen outings with Vonnie to catch the latest from Barbara Stanwyck seem a welcome alternative - at least for a while - to shadier goings-on back east, and Allen gets considerable comic mileage out of the disparity between Rose's beer-swilling, cantankerous husband (the wonderful Ken Stott) in the Bronx and the swellegant poolside environs newly available to Bobby. Eisenberg plays the perennial Allen surrogate with an open-faced gentleness that couldn't be further from the self-immolating distress he brought to his recent London stage turn in The Spoils.
The twist, of course, is that a glistening LA casts its own confusion and gloom when it transpires that Bobby's beloved Vonnie is in fact the mistress of Bobby's long-married Uncle Phil (Steve Carell, ably inheriting a role earmarked for Bruce Willis), the hot-shot agent who ends up taking Bobby under his wing, with Vonnie the appointed guide to his newfound home. The resolution lands both young lovers with a more-than-acceptable mate, even as they can't help but ponder the road not taken. Bobby, we're informed, has "a touch of the poet" about him (note the O'Neill reference), but the narrative, one feels, wouldn't be out of place in Chekhov.
Stewart, on this evidence, would make a natural Yelena in Uncle Vanya, and her performance is the revelation here, as Vonnie shuttles between Bobby and Phil, alive to the needs of both men yet dulled on some level to doubts she clearly harbours within and about herself. Playing an ad hoc philosopher who puts her life up for examination but only to a point, the actress finds a soulmate of sorts in Storaro, who gives Vonnie the shimmering entrance of anyone's dreams. And if Allen is heard but not seen in an intermittent narration, he continues to gift his performers with unanticipated grace notes, none more so than a leading lady whose triumph in society comes tempered by a sense of loss.
Singin’ in the Rain made much of those people in the movies whose work you don’t know you know. Set at the dawn of the talkies, it told of a star of the silent screen with the voice of a foghorn who relied on the angelic pipes of a trained singer parked behind a curtain. Such was the real-life story of Marni Nixon, who has died at the age of 86. You knew her soprano voice intimately. You just didn’t know her name. It was Nixon who sang for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Nixon who sang for Deborah Kerr in The King and I.
Errol Flynn’s final affair was with an initially 15-year-old girl 33 years his junior, procured minutes after he spied her walk through the studio gates. “You know who he is?” his man for such matters asks. “The most selfish man in the world” and “a walking penis” are two suggestions made in Richard Glatzer and Wash West’s biopic. “Sure,” Beverly Aadland (Dakota Fanning) answers instead. “Robin Hood.”
Skateboarding, in games and in movies, has always been presented as quite a laidback sport. This couldn't be further from that idea – it's a "twitch" arcade stick-and-button mangler that adeptly balances risk and reward and will wring hardened players for beads of sweat.