Curator Watchlist
An ambitious, sprawling period drama with strong performances and rich production design, but its adaptation of Doctorow’s novel can feel overstuffed and uneven. It’s worth watching for viewers who like historical ensembles and social critique more than tightly plotted storytelling.
Where to watch: Buy
Fri · 2h 35m
Director: Miloš Forman
Starring: James Cagney, Brad Dourif, Moses Gunn
A young black pianist becomes embroiled in the lives of an upper-class white family set among the racial tensions, infidelity, violence, and other nostalgic events in early 1900s New York City.
Miloš Forman
James Cagney, Brad Dourif, Moses Gunn
An ambitious, sprawling period drama with strong performances and rich production design, but its adaptation of Doctorow’s novel can feel overstuffed and uneven. It’s worth watching for viewers who like historical ensembles and social critique more than tightly plotted storytelling.
Ragtime is an ambitious attempt to turn a big, unruly novel into a sweeping American panorama. Miloš Forman stages early-1900s New York as a place where private desire, public spectacle, and racial violence collide, and the film’s period detail gives it a vivid, lived-in texture.
Its strongest element is the way it frames history as something that presses in on ordinary lives. The cast is stacked, and the film repeatedly finds force in individual performances, especially around the story of Coalhouse Walker and the social hypocrisies surrounding him.
At the same time, the movie can feel compressed and a little overextended at once, as if it’s trying to hold too many threads together. The result is impressive more often than it is fully seamless, but it remains a substantial, serious drama with real scale and conviction.
Rafael "Mister Movie" Jovine (3★) · 159 likes
99th Review for The Collab Weekly Movie Watch Sandwiched between two of the director’s most iconic works (Hair and Amadeus), this movie is very much the weakest of them all. It’s by no means a bad movie, in fact, I agree with every single nomination it got for the Oscars. Howard E. Rollins Jr. steals the show as this black singer who’s trying to enjoy success and the good life, but the racism makes this such an impossible thing to… more
David Sims (3.5★) · 131 likes
beginning to think adapting this novel is a tricky task!!!!
matt lynch (3.5★) · 121 likes
I have always thought it was funny that Forman essentially kicks off this suitably sprawling and literary before-its-time glance at white privilege and institutional racism by shooting Norman Mailer in the back of his noodle. Probably could have used another 30 or 45 minutes but works more than it doesn't, and the cast is stacked.
Allison M. 🌱 (4★) · 86 likes
So many great actors are in this. I have to admit that I missed recognizing half of them the first time around. To list them all here would take up several paragraphs. Let's just say he caught several great actors on film: some of them at the very beginning of their career and some at the very end of their career. Thankfully, on the DVD I rented, there's a director's commentary by the recently departed Milos Forman. This man truly
panos75 (4★) · 71 likes
In early 1900s New York City, the lives of a number of different characters occasionally intersect: a young socialite and her pathologically jealous millionaire husband, a well-intentioned wealthy suburban family, and a young black piano player who tries to start his own household while facing prejudice and discrimination, even from the authorities. While not on the same level like his Oscar-winning masterpieces, "Ragtime" is for sure Milos Forman's most underrated film. A sprawling epic that wonderfully recreates America at the… more
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racial injustice, class conflict, historical fiction, ensemble storytelling, American identity, institutional power, infidelity, social hypocrisy
historical drama, period epic, racial tension, ensemble cast, literary adaptation, social critique, New York City, turn-of-the-century, prestige drama, American history