I don’t remember when I have been more deeply affected by a film than I was by The Last Five Years, a jewel box of a movie-musical that is unquestionably the best of its kind since Chicago was released in 2003. It is at once a tiny slip of a thing and an emotional blockbuster. Over the course of a brisk 90 minutes, The Last Five Years provides an exhilarating and devastating account of the relationship between a successful young writer and an unsuccessful young actress.
Jamie and Cathy are its only characters. There is almost no spoken dialogue; the movie is sung through. And like the greatest of all sung-through musicals, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), the power of The Last Five Years derives from the pointed contrast between the sweeping romanticism of its beautiful...
