Denby on Moulin Rouge

I didn't know they had this great movie review database here at The New Yorker Online.

Moulin Rouge
(2001)
A frantically ambitious postmodernist musical in which no single song is performed from beginning to end and no dance number is staged without the dancers' movements being kaleidoscoped into a dozen angles. Set in a stylized and digitalized Paris, the movie offers the Moulin Rouge night club as a seething Belle Époque Studio 54, where a fresh-from-the-provinces poet named Christian (Ewan McGregor) falls in love with Satine (Nicole Kidman), a consumptive cancan dancer and courtesan. The story is no more than a flimsy outline, but it still manages to combine the Orpheus myth and "Camille" and to vaguely evoke about a dozen other films. When the lovers sing a duet, they begin with a few bars of the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love" and pass through bits of Phil Collins, U2, and David Bowie and Brian Eno before capping it off with Elton John's "Your Song." It's as if the director, Baz Luhrmann, felt that he could hold the target audience of young people only by making reference to their entire experience of pop music. Luhrmann has a talent for décor, sudden shifts in perspective, and gentle, twinkling nighttime effects, but he whips much of the movie into an opéra-bouffe clownishness.
— David Denby