Sing Street

Don’t like musicals? These movies will make you a fan.

The show is moving up from Off-Broadway.

It’s a big year for the Oscars, and not just because of the movies. 2016 brought us a record-breaking 27 animated films eligible for Best Animated Feature, and today the Academy announced that there is a whopping 91 tracks eligible for Best Original Song.

What a difference six months makes. Back in the summer, the world of film was all gloom and doom. Television was great; the movies were terrible. One respected critic even speculated that someday the world would look back at 2016 as “the year that movies died.”

There are four seasons to a year, but only two seasons to a movie year: Summer, which now starts around late February, and Awards.

With Sing Street currently charming the pants off of critics and moviegoers alike, we’ve come one step closer to forgetting all about Begin Again — John Carney’s misstep between the beloved 2007 musical Once and his latest effort. You’d think that Carney would be proud of his acclaimed new musical and thrilled that it’s been so well-received. You’d think this guy couldn’t possibly have anything negative to say at this moment in time. You’d think that he might also be happy that most people seem to have forgotten about Begin Again. Your thinking could not be more wrong.

The 2016 SXSW Film Festival lineup is looking better and better. If the latest from Richard Linklater and Jeff Nichols weren’t enough to get you excited, then this latest batch certainly will.

As any fan of ‘Once’ can attest, writer, director John Carney is a master at capturing the complexities of love through music. In his latest musical, ‘Sing Street,’ Carney pulls from his own past as a misfit school boy in the 1980s who found solace in music.

Is it OK to jump out of your seat and the end of the movie and pump your fist with excitement like it’s the end of an epic, transcendent rock concert? Because that’s what I wanted to do at the end of Sing Street, the latest romance musical film from John Carney (Once), whose sheer joy and enthusiasm is so infectious it’s very hard to not clap, cry and, yeah, jump out of your seat...

Has there ever been a better time to be teenage, depressed, and listening to music than the United Kingdom in the ‘80s? The seedlings of New Wave and post-punk had been planted during the rollicking ‘70s, and the industrial dead ends of small-town life in the U.K. facilitated their germination into the thriving scenes in Manchester and London. Anyone coping with the myriad indignities of life in high school needed only to put on the latest record from the Cure and allow the melancholy to wash over them. The kids were not alone; they had Robert Smith.