La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016)

Somewhat similarly to The Artist, which swept the board with the awards back in 2011, La La Land bases much of its appeal on being a loving recreation of the films of a bygone era. In this case, it's the golden age of the Gene Kelly-led musical, through fantastical song-and-dance sequences spliced into a modern-day love story, and you'd swear some of the routines are exact replicas.
Wherein lies the rub. While it's nice to see the attention to detail, by the time one sequence actually has the sailors from On the Town in the cast, it starts smacking less of homage and more of pure exploitation. Likewise with the jazz element: Ryan Gosling's idealistic muso expounds at great length about the lost creativity of jazz, and then produces the most trad stuff imaginable. The film was accused of whitewashing the genre, but that's not really the problem. The problem is one of not adding anything to the two musical traditions that it champions, just using them.
All of the above, however, should not be allowed to overrule the film's manifold virtues. The relationship between Gosling and Stone is a sweet one, the numbers are great, all saturated primary colours and perfect editing, and the ending, against all logic, is truly moving. It's a deeply flawed mish-mash, but deserves plaudits nevertheless for its ambitions and sheer brio.

7/10