Moulin Rouge! (2001) Review – Truth, Beauty, Freedom and a Whole Lot of Love Songs

★★★★☆ Our Rating: 8.5/10

In 2001, the movie musical was supposed to be dead. Hollywood had not produced a major hit in the genre for years, and the smart money said audiences would never again accept characters bursting into song. Baz Luhrmann’s answer was to make the most artificial film imaginable — a Paris cabaret in 1899 where the performers sing Madonna, Elton John, Nirvana and The Police — and to play every second of it completely straight, with total emotional sincerity. Moulin Rouge! opened the Cannes Film Festival in May 2001, became a worldwide hit, earned eight Academy Award nominations and effectively restarted the modern movie musical.

It is also, let us be honest from the start, a film some viewers bounce straight off. Its editing is frantic, its colours are turned up past maximum, and its plot is a deliberate stack of melodrama’s oldest devices: the penniless writer, the dying courtesan, the jealous duke, a love that must be hidden. Luhrmann knows all of this. The film’s wager is that pop songs you already know, performed as if lives depend on them, will carry you over every objection — and for most audiences, for over two decades now, it has. This Moulin Rouge! review looks at how the trick works, where it frays, and why its stage adaptation is still packing theatres today.

Quick Facts: Moulin Rouge! at a Glance

The Story: A Writer, a Sparkling Diamond and a Show That Must Go On (Spoiler-Free)

Paris, 1899. Christian (Ewan McGregor), a young English writer with no money and unlimited faith in love, arrives in Montmartre to join the Bohemian revolution, whose creed the film states outright: truth, beauty, freedom and, above all, love. Through a troupe of penniless performers led by the artist Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo), Christian is taken to the Moulin Rouge — the legendary nightclub ruled by impresario Harold Zidler (Jim Broadbent) — to pitch a show. There he meets Satine (Nicole Kidman), the club’s star courtesan, marketed as the Sparkling Diamond, and the two fall for each other in the space of a single, glorious musical misunderstanding: she mistakes him for the wealthy Duke whose investment Zidler desperately needs, and he mistakes her performance of seduction for the real thing.

The machinery of melodrama then engages, and the film is upfront about it. To save the club, Zidler promises Satine to the Duke (Richard Roxburgh), who will fund the new show — a spectacular called Spectacular Spectacular, with Christian secretly writing it and secretly loving its star. Satine, meanwhile, is carrying a secret of her own about her health, which the film signals early and which hangs over every joyful number that follows. None of this is hidden from the audience: the film opens a year later, with a broken Christian typing the story we are about to see, telling us plainly that the woman he loved is gone. The question is never what happens. It is how it feels getting there — and that is the correct question, because feeling is this film’s entire special effect.

Performances: Two Stars Singing for Their Lives

Nicole Kidman as Satine gives the performance that completed her transformation from movie star to major actor. Satine has to be two people — the Diamond, a calculating professional who performs desire for a living, and the frightened young woman underneath who has never been permitted to want anything for herself — and Kidman switches between them inside single scenes, sometimes inside single lines. Her singing, a genuine surprise in 2001, is fragile and theatrical in exactly the right proportions, and her comic timing in the early mistaken-identity scenes is superb. She earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress and won the Golden Globe in the musical/comedy category, and the film’s final movement rests entirely on her ability to play joy and doom at the same time. She manages it.

Ewan McGregor as Christian has the purer, harder assignment: play absolute romantic sincerity without irony, in a film sprinting at a hundred miles an hour. His singing voice turned out to be the film’s secret weapon — a clear, yearning tenor that makes the Elton John standard Your Song feel like it was written for this character. McGregor’s openness is the audience’s way in; when Christian believes, the film believes.

Jim Broadbent as Zidler won the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor, and it is easy to see why: his impresario is a ringmaster, a pimp, a father figure and a drowning man, sometimes within one musical number, and his full-throated take on Madonna’s Like a Virgin is the film’s comic peak. John Leguizamo as Toulouse-Lautrec brings a bruised gentleness that grounds the Bohemians, while Richard Roxburgh as the Duke plays his villainy as wounded entitlement curdling into something genuinely frightening — a man who believes money entitles him to own people, in a story where everyone else, however poor, knows better.

Direction and Technical Craft

Moulin Rouge! is the closing film of Luhrmann’s Red Curtain trilogy, after Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet, and it is his method at maximum intensity. Shot in Sydney, Australia, on vast soundstage sets, the film builds its Paris from pure theatre: painted skies, miniature rooftops, a windmill blazing red against a storybook night. Catherine Martin’s production and costume design — which won the film two Academy Awards, for Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design — create a world where every frame is stuffed with corsets, can-can colour and gaslight glamour, and Donald McAlpine’s cinematography treats the camera like a dancer, swooping through the club in impossible arcs.

Editor Jill Bilcock cuts the first half-hour at music-video speed, and this is where the film honestly risks losing people. The opening act is a barrage — songs, jokes, introductions and plot arriving simultaneously — and viewers who need cinema to calm down will find it exhausting. The defence, and it is a fair one, is that the frenzy is the subject: this is the Moulin Rouge as a young man’s senses experience it for the first time. Significantly, Luhrmann slows the cutting as the love story deepens and the tone darkens, so the film’s form quietly mirrors its feeling. By the final act the camera lingers, and the melodrama lands with a force the early chaos has secretly prepared. Whether you call that daring or undisciplined will decide your relationship with the whole film — but it is a choice, not an accident.

Music and Background Score

This is a jukebox musical, and its method is collage. Luhrmann and his music team take twentieth-century pop — songs by Elton John, David Bowie, U2, Paul McCartney, Kiss, Phil Collins and Dolly Parton among many others — and stitch them into the story, most famously in the Elephant Love Medley, where Christian and Satine argue for and against love entirely in quoted lyrics. The film’s one major original song, Come What May, written by David Baerwald and Kevin Gilbert, becomes the lovers’ secret anthem and the story’s emotional key. Craig Armstrong’s orchestral score threads the pop material together and supplies the swelling romantic underscoring that tells you, without apology, exactly how to feel.

The soundtrack became a phenomenon in its own right. The first album reached the top of the charts in Australia and New Zealand, peaked at number three on the Billboard 200 and was certified double platinum in the United States. Its flagship single, a remake of Lady Marmalade by Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Mýa and Pink, spent five weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. Purists sometimes complain that the film borrows its emotions from songs the audience already loves. The film’s answer is built into its story: in 1899 as in 2001, popular songs are how ordinary people say the enormous things. It is hard to sit through McGregor’s Your Song, sung on a rooftop above a glittering Paris, and call the emotion unearned.

What Works and What Doesn’t

What we loved:

• Nicole Kidman’s Satine — glamorous, funny and quietly devastating, in a career-defining performance
• Ewan McGregor’s singing and total sincerity as Christian, the film’s emotional anchor
• Catherine Martin’s Oscar-winning design and costumes — a self-contained jewel-box Paris
• The Elephant Love Medley and Come What May, musical sequences that turn pop quotation into real drama
• An ending that earns its heartbreak honestly, having warned you from the first scene exactly where it was going

What could be better:

• The first act’s hyperactive editing will exhaust some viewers before the story settles
• The plot is unashamed melodrama — a jealous duke, a hidden illness, a show within the show — and offers no surprises by design
• The Duke’s late-film turn toward menace is effective but abrupt
• If you dislike pop music or musicals on principle, this film will not convert you; it doubles down instead

Box Office: The Musical That Refused to Die Quietly

The core figures are consistent across reference sources: produced for about $50 million — some listings put the budget slightly higher, around $52 million — Moulin Rouge! grossed approximately $179 million worldwide, roughly $57 million of it in North America and the bulk internationally, a healthy success for an original musical with no pre-sold franchise behind it. Its awards run amplified its commercial life: eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actress, with two wins for art direction and costume design. It was the first musical nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in a decade, since Beauty and the Beast, and it is widely credited alongside Chicago the following year with reviving studio confidence in the genre. Its longest tail, though, has been theatrical in a different sense: the stage adaptation, Moulin Rouge! The Musical, opened on Broadway in 2019, won ten Tony Awards including Best Musical, and continues to tour — a second life few films of 2001 can claim.

Verdict: Should You Watch It?

If you have never seen it, watch it with the volume up and your defences down — this is a film that punishes half-attention and rewards surrender. If the first twenty minutes exhilarate you, the last twenty will break your heart; if they exhaust you, no later scene will fully win you back, and that is a fair response the film accepts in advance. Moulin Rouge! remains the purest example of Baz Luhrmann’s cinema: artificial in every detail, sincere in every feeling, and built around the unfashionable belief that love, sung loudly enough, is a subject big enough for the largest screen in the building.

Our rating: 8.5/10 — a glittering, breathless, genuinely moving pop opera that restarted the movie musical.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Moulin Rouge! based on a true story?
The Moulin Rouge is a real Paris cabaret founded in 1889, and Toulouse-Lautrec was a real artist who painted its posters. Christian and Satine are fictional, and the story draws loosely on classic tales including the opera La Traviata and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Did Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor really sing?
Yes. Both leads performed their own vocals, as did Jim Broadbent and John Leguizamo. McGregor’s version of Your Song and the duet Come What May are both performed by the actors on screen and on the soundtrack albums.

What is the Elephant Love Medley?
It is the film’s signature sequence, in which Christian and Satine debate whether love is real, singing fragments of famous love songs — by The Beatles, U2, Kiss, Phil Collins, Dolly Parton and others — back and forth as dialogue.

Is Moulin Rouge! suitable for children?
It is rated PG-13. The setting is a cabaret and courtesan culture is central to the plot, though handled suggestively rather than explicitly, and the film deals with illness and death. It suits teenagers and above best.

Where can I watch Moulin Rouge!?
It is available on major streaming platforms and on Blu-ray and 4K home releases in most regions. The stage musical also tours widely — check local theatre listings if you want the live version.