Film

Lisztomania

Ken Russell's 1975 fever dream about Franz Liszt, where history bends to psychedelia and rock opera logic. Roger Daltrey as the virtuoso pianist, Ringo Starr as the Pope, and enough wild visual excess to make your eyeballs hurt in the best way. For people who think biopics are too boring and music documentaries too reverent.

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Tommy1975

Ken Russell directing Pete Townshend's rock opera with the same anarchic energy and visual mayhem as Lisztomania. Pinball, deaf-blind-dumb transcendence, and performances that feel like possession rather than acting.

But It's almost three hours of maximalist rock-theatre that asks you to roll with pure spectacle over coherence. Exhausting if you want subtlety.

Tommy poster

Hedwig and the Angry Inch2001

A musical biography that refuses earnestness, where rock music and fractured identity collide with genuine tenderness. John Cameron Mitchell channels performer-as-flame, much like Daltrey here, refusing to let the camera look away.

But It's aggressively stylized and sometimes feels like an inside joke. The gender politics, though thoughtful, are dense.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch poster

The Rocky Horror Picture Show1975

Released the same year, equally mad, equally willing to treat music and history as a playground for ridicule and reinvention. Campy excess in service of real emotional stakes underneath.

But The cult classic aura can feel gatekeep-y. And if you're not in the mood for winking, it reads as smug.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show poster

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Mad Max: Fury Road2015

Both films treat the camera and editing like a musical instrument, where excess isn't decoration but the actual point. Liszt's virtuosity is Wagner's operatic ambition is Fury Road's chrome and flame.

George Miller crafting a two-hour symphony of visual maximalism where action IS the story and every frame is composed like a painting. Vehicles, color, violence, and sound treated like instruments. Russell would recognize this as kinship.

But Almost no dialogue, minimal plot, and very loud. If you want character development or emotional quietness, you won't find it here.

Mad Max: Fury Road poster
More like this (7)

Raging Bull1980

Scorsese's biography of boxer Jake LaMotta uses visual excess and fractured editing to show a man undone by his own nature. Formal experimentation applied to the machinery of male ego and self-destruction.

But Black-and-white, relentlessly grim, and slow in places. It's Liszt's self-sabotage but stripped of humor and sexuality.

Raging Bull poster

Amadeus1984

Another composer biography that's really about jealousy, genius, and the gap between talent and decency. Milos Forman makes Mozart a star and Salieri a tragic villain in a film that understands music as drama.

But Three hours of 18th-century court intrigue. If you prefer action to conversation, this will feel slow.

Amadeus poster

The Phantom of the Opera2004

Joel Schumacher's musical biography of obsession, where music becomes a weapon and the composer is simultaneously creator and destroyer. Gerard Butler as tortured genius with a mask and trauma.

But Critically derided and very earnest where Lisztomania is gleeful. Heavy-handed in its gothic melodrama.

The Phantom of the Opera poster

La La Land2016

A modern musical that understands music and ambition as romantic forces, with the kind of visual audacity and colour-flooding that Russell would recognize. Damien Chazelle makes Los Angeles shimmer like a dream.

But Sickeningly optimistic about art and love. If cynicism is your native language, this will feel treacly.

La La Land poster

8½1963

Fellini's masterpiece about a film director having a creative and personal breakdown, surrounded by circus performers, mistresses, and ghosts. Visual excess as a mirror of the mind's chaos and hunger.

But Italian, three hours, and deeply melancholic beneath the spectacle. It's a film about exhaustion made for the exhausted.

8½ poster

The Hunger1983

Tony Scott's film about two ageless vampires and their hunger, with Catherine Deneuve as eternal seduction incarnate. Glossy, erotic, and unconcerned with realism or coherence—pure style as substance.

But Thin plot, explicit sexuality, and a narrative that barely holds together. Pretty but vapid if you're looking for meaning.

The Hunger poster

Waltz with Bashir2008

Both use stylization and artifice—Russell's deliberately theatrical excess, Ari Folman's animated surrealism—to tell the truth about ambitious, damaged men. Both trust the form to carry what realism can't.

An animated documentary about a filmmaker trying to recover his memories of the Lebanese Civil War, where visual surrealism and music become the language of trauma and truth. Animation here is not whimsy but necessity.

But It's about war crimes and memory and gets quietly, devastatingly real. Not escapist, despite the animation. The ending is difficult.

Waltz with Bashir poster

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Song of Norway, The Music Lovers