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While we're talking about the Movies of the Year, let us not forget the new, feel-good movie of 2005, The Phantom of the Opera.

The New Yorker's Anthony Lane clearly lives for moments like this, as he slices and dices this movie into small, bloody pieces. Better yet, his review mixes pop-cultural references and literary allusions that only an FBer could truly appreciate. We should invite him to join us.

• The plot is impressively free of anything that does not smell of unpasteurized melodrama. The bulk of it takes place in 1870, in Paris—ah, Paris, so overwhelming in its impact that while some of its blessed citizens remember to speak English with a French accent, others do not. We are at the Opéra, where everything and, if possible, everybody that can be gilded with gold has received the necessary treatment. The new patron is the Vicomte de Chagny (Patrick Wilson), who is long of locks, blue of blood, and unquenchably drippy of demeanor. The in-house diva is Carlotta—played with gusto by Minnie Driver, who has the gall to suggest that there might be some comic value to be trawled from this movie, and who is therefore hastily shoved to the side of the proceedings before she can cause any more trouble. When Carlotta flounces out, her place is taken by Christine (Emmy Rossum), who until now has been, yes, a simple chorus girl, and who brings the house down on, yes, her first performance.
  
  But wait. There is more. Christine, who in other respects seems perfectly sane, believes that she has been taught to sing by the ghost of her father. In fact, her tutor is a nice lad in half a hockey mask who lives under the floorboards. He is the Phantom (Gerard Butler), his career ambitions include theatre management, and to get to his lair you go through the looking glass, along the creepy corridor, down the spiral staircase, take the first horse on your right (what the hell is a horse doing down there?), hop into the punt, drift under the dripping portcullis, past the multiple mirrors, and, bang, you’re there, right in the middle of a bed shaped like a giant eagle. Watch out for its beak when you bend over to take your boots off.
  
  As befits a man who began his career dressing the windows of Bendel’s, Joel Schumacher decorates his latest enterprise to within an inch of its life, if not beyond. There are nods to the inventiveness of Orson Welles and Jean Cocteau (the live, candle-bearing arms emerging from the wall are yet another steal from “Beauty and the Beast”), but Schumacher’s principal debt is to the higher reaches of the textile industry, and if you ever longed to know what it feels like to be asphyxiated by brocade, here is your chance. The irony is that, as visual habits go, there is none more threadbare than this brand of subterranean gothic, at once fussy and lumpen, with its frankly unhygienic mixture of lingerie and dungeons. It reminds us that “The Phantom of the Opera” is a period piece, and that the period in question is not 1870 but 1986, when Lloyd Webber first presented his production to the world. We should not be surprised, then, if this bellowing beast of a movie looks and sounds like the extended special-edition remix of a Duran Duran video.