Quite possibly the worst movie of all time!

Rating: 1/10 (16 January 2003)

Baz Luhrmann makes Ed Wood look like Truffaut. At least Wood had no budget as an excuse. Luhrmann has made a movie of pseudo-pop style and absolutely no substance, a piece of frivolous camp which makes the fatal mistake of taking itself seriously. You are better off renting Rocky Horror Picture Show and watching an honest work of cinema.
The film is a derivative, cliche-ridden two-hour music video. It has little to do with the real Moulin Rouge, either in setting, history, or people. Yes, we see Monte Martre and a red windmill, but they are scarcely recognizable after the computer animators got through with them.
The script is absolutely dreadful, with no perceptible distinction between scenes of comedy and attempted pathos. The only clues we are given by the director are via his knee-jerk invocation of passe cinematic devices, like when doomed heroine Kidman repeatedly falls to the floor in skip-frame slow-mo. Otherwise, the characters whoosh around with cartoon sound effects, like Wile E. Coyote, making them less than one-dimensional -- a fractal dimension of about 0.3, perhaps.
"Moulin Rouge" will probably be remembered in film history as the apex of the "auteur gone wild with cash" period of the turn of the 21st century. It is destined to be shown in film schools as one of the finest examples of how not to make a movie.