★★★★★
The film that launched a thousand pop promos and informed the iconography of everyone from Madonna to Beyoncé (it’s a “chair dancing” thing), Cabaret is often overlooked as one of the great pieces of political film-making. Set in the riotous, gender-fluid Kit Kat Klub in Weimar Berlin in 1931, it features knockout show tunes from the star turn Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles, including the title track and Mein Herr (aaaand cue the chair). But it also tracks the rise of Nazism with sickening dread.
It repeatedly castigates political complacency and boasts one of the most chilling camera movements in cinema history — a pan from the face of a cherubic German boy singing Tomorrow Belongs to Me down to his Hitler Youth uniform.
