Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Inside the Kit Kat Club of 1931 Berlin, starry-eyed singer Sally Bowles and an impish emcee sound the clarion call to decadent fun, while outside a certain political party grows into a brutal force.
Cabaret is a landmark musical film that fundamentally reinvented the genre by keeping nearly all musical numbers diegetic, grounding song and dance in gritty, politically charged reality rather than fantasy. Bob Fosse's direction is visually arresting — the jagged editing, expressionistic lighting, and tight framing of the Kit Kat Club sequences are cinematographically exceptional. Liza Minnelli delivers an iconic, fully inhabited performance, and Joel Grey's emcee is one of cinema's great supporting turns, earning his Oscar unambiguously. The film's novelty is high: its use of cabaret as political mirror, its frank treatment of bisexuality, and its refusal of a clean emotional resolution were bold and singular for 1972. The plot itself is serviceable — a romantic triangle that functions more as scaffolding than as compelling drama — and the ending, while appropriately unsettling and thematically resonant, doesn't fully cohere emotionally, leaving the human threads somewhat underdeveloped relative to the film's political ambitions.