To put Shirley Temple’s influence in perspective, consider that at the age of 9 she had the box-office drawing power of Julia Roberts and Reese Witherspoon combined. Curly Top shouldn’t be watched while eating a candy bar – the combined sugar content with this tale of an orphan (Temple) who is adopted by a millionaire

Valuable alone for the furor caused among movie lovers after winning the Palme d’Or at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival – some saw it as revolutionary cinema, others as manipulative pap – Danish director Lars von Trier’s invigorating curiosity transplants the grand emotions of musical theater into our voyeuristic digital age. Pop star Bjork is

Best known today as the centerpiece of interactive costume parties, this amalgam of science fiction, classic horror and glam rock follows a clean-cut couple (Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon) who wander into the castle of the vamping, sexually ambiguous, bustier-favoring alien Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry). Partly a sendup of conservative tradition, partly a gay pride

One in a series of Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello movie musicals, Bikini Beach has everything you’d expect from a squeaky-clean, 1960s teen picture: cheesy sound effects, countless fake backgrounds, outfits that look like lamp shades, random musical numbers and, for no apparent reason, a chimp (or at least a man in a chimp suit). I couldn’t

This may be the definitive Busby Berkeley-choreographed musical simply because the entire movie revels in the sort of things that Berkeley’s elaborate dance numbers revel in: innuendo, flirtations and flesh. The movie chronicles the backstage romances and betrayals of a major Broadway production, but the faceless formations of the finale are what give the proceedings

This Best Picture-winning adaptation of the Broadway hit is more of a traditional musical than, say, Moulin Rouge, but its stars make up for any lack of cinematic invention. As nightclub singers turned murderers in jazz-era Chicago, Renee Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones attack their roles as if the movie were a last-chance audition. Zeta-Jones brings

A celebration of life as one big pop song, the Beatles’ 1964 musical farce opens with the famous image of the band being chased down the street by a mob of screaming girls and barely slows down from there. Director Richard Lester’s near-revolutionary visuals also framed a prescient commentary on the age of celebrity the