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The Greatest Showman may not be a great movie, but it has great things in it. It’s not so much a biography of P.T. Barnum as it is a celebration of show business and as such, it works magnificently. The infectious joy of performing leaps off the screen as it did with 42nd Street, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Singin’ in the Rain, Easter Parade, The Band Wagon, The Sound of Music, Cabaret, and a handful of other film musicals that put the show in show business.

According to star Hugh Jackman, the film had its genesis at the 2008 Academy Awards which he hosted in February 2009 in which commercial director Michael Gracey had an uncredited role. He promised Gracey that they would work together again and surprised him a short while later by asking him to direct the film whose screenplay would be written by two other participants in that Oscar show, Jenny Biggs and Oscar winner Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters). Gracey brought on co-star Zac Efron and songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul early in the planning of the film which took seven years to complete.

Jackman, of course, has the plum part of Barnum. Others impersonating real-life people include Michelle Williams as Barnum’s wife Charity, Rebecca Ferguson as Swedish nightingale Jenny Lind, and Sam Humphrey as miniature Tom Thumb. Efron’s fictional character is based, in part, on James A. Bailey, Barnum’s real-life business partner. Zendaya as his love interest, is a total fabrication while Keala Settle’s bearded lady is a composite of the real-life Josephine Clofullia and Annie Jones.

The film almost didn’t happen after seven years of preparation. What cinched it was Pasek and Paul’s last-minute composition of the Oscar-nominated song, “This Is Me,” originally intended for Tom Thumb, and the way it was put across in the audition for 20th Century-Fox suits by Settle as the bearded lady, who is joined for one stanza in the film by Humphrey as Tom Thumb and then the entire cast of “oddities” to bring it home.

To me, this film is far superior to 2016’s La La Land for which Pasek and Paul were nominated for two of their songs and won for one. Whereas that film had two leads who couldn’t sing and wouldn’t be dubbed, this one is cast with people who not only can sing, but who sing and dance their hearts out in number after number. The score has more in common with Pasek and Paul’s Tony-winning Dear Evan Hanson than the overrated La La Land which copped six Oscars out of fourteen nominations in a less competitive year.

The Greatest Showman is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Most actors don’t retire, they just fade into obscurity when no one casts them anymore. Daniel Day-Lewis, a three-time Oscar winner for My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood, and Lincoln, is a rare exception. He announced before the start of filming on his latest, Phantom Thread, that it would be his last as an actor. We’ll see if that holds true or if he is enticed into making another film somewhere down the line.

Paul Thomas Anderson, who directed the actor to his second Oscar in There Will Be Blood, is the director of Phantom Thread, a gothic romance set in the 1950s in which Day-Lewis plays a reclusive fashion designer whose muse (Vicky Krieps) wants more out of their relationship. Lesley Manville is Day-Lewis’ housekeeper-sister, cast in the mold of Rebecca‘s Mrs. Danvers. All three actors are superb, as is the film’s score by Jonny Greenwood and the exquisite Oscar-winning costume designs of Mark Bridges. Unfortunately, however, the film has so many threads that are not followed through that one wonders if that could be the meaning of the title which is never explained within the narrative.

Phantom Thread is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

One of the most famous crimes of the latter part of the twentieth century was the kidnapping of 16-year-old John Paul Getty in Rome in 1973, made worse by the refusal of his tightfisted grandfather, billionaire J. Paul Getty, to pay the ransom for his release. Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World tells the tale from three perspectives, that of the teenage victim (Charlie Plummer); his distraught, penniless mother (Michelle Williams); and her 81-year-old miserly former father-in-law (Christopher Plummer). All three actors acquit themselves quite well. The younger Plummer, no relation to the elder one, is excellent as the frightened teenager. Williams, excellent as usual, is outstanding as his mother, and the elder Plummer is peerless in the role that he famously filmed as a replacement for the disgraced Kevin Spacey just as the film was about to hit theatres. It’s difficult to believe that Spacey could have been half as good doing in old age makeup what 88-year-old Plummer seems to do so effortlessly in his own skin.

All the Money in the World is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Aaron Sorkin, who won an Oscar for writing The Social Network, makes his belated directorial debut with Molly’s Game, a well-written and acted version of the book by Molly Bloom who went from Olympic skier to cocktail waitress to poker entrepreneur in the space of twelve years before she was arrested as part of a money-laundering scheme. Jessica Chastain plays Molly in the film in which most of the names of those involved have been changed to protect both the guilty and the innocent. Chastain, Idris Elba as her attorney, and Kevin Costner as her father each give strong performances in this often-compelling real-life drama.

Molly’s Game is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Warner Archive has released two long unavailable films on DVD only.

Ronald Colman received two Oscar nominations for Best Actor for 1929/30 for his first two talkies, the already available Bulldog Drummond and the newly released Condemned. Condemned was a change of pace for the usually suave actor who had been on screen since 1917. In it, he plays a young Frenchman sent to the South American French penal colony known as Devil’s Island for theft. Assigned to the home of the sadistic warden (Dudley Digges), he falls in love with the warden’s sensitive wife (Ann Harding). Colman, Harding, Digges, and Louis Wolheim as a hardened criminal with a heart of gold form a quartet of fine performances that deserves to be better-known.

Designed as a star-making vehicle for character actor James Stephenson, 1941’s Shining Victory was released just a month before the actor died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 52. Based on a play by A.J. Cronin (The Citadel, The Keys of the Kingdom), Stephenson plays a crusading doctor in the field of dementia precox (now known as schizophrenia) whose new assistant (Geraldine Fitzgerald) plans on becoming a medical missionary in China. Stephenson, Fitzgerald, and Barbara O’Neil as a secretary who ought to be one of the patients at the Scottish sanitorium where they work, all shine in their roles.

This week’s new releases include The Post and the Criterion Edition Blu-ray of The Awful Truth.

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