Movie musicals you might fall for: Moana, Wicked and yes, the Joker sequel

A couple of deliciously dark musicals are among the movies coming to you this spring. Photo / Warner Bros

Fans of the contemporary grown-up movie musical — defined as live-action, non-Disney and no-happy-ending-or-singing-animals-required — felt a tantalising spark with the arrival of the lushly bittersweet La La Land. Damien Chazelle’s 2016 homage to the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals seemed to herald the rebirth of a beloved yet bygone genre. Since then, we have been treated to, sporadically, The Greatest Showman, A Star Is Born, Rocketman, West Side Story and The Color Purple, among others.

This season’s crop of musicals includes such animated fare as Spellbound (November 22 on Netflix), featuring songs by Alan Menken, known for his work with Disney. Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the songs for Moana, has stepped away from the film’s sequel to handle songwriting for Disney’s live-action prequel Mufasa: The Lion King (December 19). In his place, TikTok breakthroughs Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear have written the songs for Moana 2 (November 28), making history as Disney’s first female songwriting duo.

TikTok breakthroughs Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear have written the songs for Moana 2. Photo / Disney

For family-friendly musicals, the season’s most anticipated release is probably Wicked, an adaptation of Broadway’s Tony- and Drama Desk-winning Wizard of Oz prequel, starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. Featuring songs by Stephen Schwartz, part one of the two-stage release hits New Zealand theatres on November 21.

Then there’s Joker: Folie a Deux (October 3). Todd Phillips’ bittersweet-chocolate, jukebox-musical romance is a sequel to his noirish 2019 original, which won a best-actor Oscar for Joaquin Phoenix as the DC Comics supervillain, a criminally insane failed comedian named Arthur Fleck.

Lady Gaga joins the film as Arthur’s love interest Harley Quinn. Photo / Warner Bros

Joining Phoenix is Lady Gaga as Arthur’s love interest Harley Quinn, a role that has been botched not once but twice — in 2016 and 2021 — in duelling Suicide Squad movies. Although details about the new story are under wraps, the Motion Picture Association has slapped the sequel with another R rating, for violence, coarse language, sexuality and — uh-oh — full nudity.

Folie a Deux, which takes its subtitle from the French term for shared psychosis, isn’t the only deliciously dark cloud on the musical horizon: Keep an eye out for The End, by Joshua Oppenheimer, and starring Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, George MacKay and Moses Ingram. Although it has no confirmed release date, the first narrative feature from the documentarian behind The Act of Killing (2013) and The Look of Silence (2015) will play at September’s Toronto Film Festival, which describes the sombre story as revolving around “what seems to be the last remaining human family on Earth, as they hide in an ornate bunker built deep inside a salt mine after environmental collapse has destroyed society.”

The Motion Picture Association has slapped the Joker sequel with another R rating. Photo / Warner Bros

“We use music to make us whole, to balance the fractures within ourselves,” an unidentified voice says in Folie a Deux’s trailer. Maybe that’s so. But a couple of potentially groundbreaking movies seem determined to create a few fissures on the dance floor themselves.

Five more movie picks

Look Into My Eyes: Amid a diverse slate of nonfiction films about the opioid crisis, war, election denialism, indie rockers and other familiar documentary topics, the biggest surprise of this summer’s fledgling DC/Dox film festival was this gem of a nonfiction film about New York psychics and their clients.

Film-maker Lana Wilson’s follow-up to Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, last year’s thoughtful two-part profile of the actress on Hulu, is neither a debunking nor a credulous puff piece. Rather, with a gentle evenhandedness, it slowly evolves into a lovely and moving meditation on loneliness, longing and the universal search for connection. Starring Per Erik Borja, Eugene Grygo, Nikenya Hall, Phoebe Hoffman, Michael Kim, Sherrie Lynne, Ilka Pinheiro.

Megalopolis: Four decades in the making, Francis Ford Coppola’s experimental/allegorical cautionary tale about America’s slide toward fascism has, against all odds, found a commercial distributor.

It’s not clear how theatres will handle some of the film’s more unorthodox bits: In one scene, Driver’s character — a visionary architect with the ability to control time — interacts with a live, off-screen performer in the audience.

The film, whose 85-year-old director has said it will not be his last, is sure to be polarising: The Post’s Jada Yuan reported that the reactions of audience members at this spring’s Cannes premiere were “positive, negative, confused — but almost 100% passionate.”

Starring Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Shia LaBeouf. (September 26).

Saturday Night: Gabriel LaBelle, whose breakthrough came playing a teenage stand-in for Steven Spielberg in the director’s autobiographical 2022 film The Fabelmans, portrays Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels in this Jason Reitman-directed, behind-the-scenes dramedy about preparations for the long-running sketch-comedy show’s premiere 1975 episode.

In the trailer, Cooper Hoffman’s Dick Ebersol, then in charge of NBC’s late-night programming, dismisses SNL as a “counterculture show starring total unknowns, with zero narrative and even less structure.” Fittingly, a bunch of up-and-comers play Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman and Gilda Radner. Starring LaBelle, Willem Dafoe, Hoffman, Finn Wolfhard, J.K. Simmons, Dylan O’Brien, Matt Wood, Cory Michael Smith, Kim Matula, Lamorne Morris, Emily Fairn, Ella Hunt. (November 7).

A newly buff Paul Mescal plays Lucius in Gladiator II. Photo / Paramount Pictures

Gladiator II: In director Ridley Scott’s sequel to his multi-Oscar-winning swords-and-sandals epic, a newly buff Paul Mescal plays Lucius, a gladiator who tells Denzel Washington’s bad guy in the trailer that he never knew his mother or father.

This comment opens the door a crack to some potentially interesting revelations about his parentage: In the 2000 film, Lucius was the son of Nielsen’s Lucilla, once romantically involved with the title character, Maximus, played by Russell Crowe. Both Scott and Crowe have confessed to having mixed feelings about the need to breach the first film’s closure. But as we learned from a social media trend last year, most men apparently can’t stop thinking about ancient Rome. Starring Mescal, Washington, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger, Connie Nielsen, Derek Jacobi, Matt Lucas. (November 14.)

A Complete Unknown: Timothee Chalamet channels a young Bob Dylan in this musical biopic, set around the time of the singer/songwriter/eventual Nobel Prize winner’s transition from acoustic to electric guitar.

The actor — who also produced — provides his own vocals for the film, which was co-written and directed by James Mangold (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny).

That’s brave, considering the actor’s unmemorable performance in last year’s saccharine musical Wonka, not to mention the spotty track record for musical biopics in general. Starring: Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Edward Norton, Boyd Holbrook, Monica Barbaro, Scoot McNairy. (January 23.)