MOVIES: You Had to Be There (2025, Nick Davis)

The musical Godspell opened off-Broadway in 1971, and was such a hit that new companies began to appear around the world within a few months. This documentary focuses on the 1972 Toronto production, which Lin-Manuel Miranda describes as the "'27 Yankees of comedy." That cast included Victor Garber, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Martin Short, and Dave Thomas; Paul Shaffer was the musical director. And those are just the names that are well known in the United States; both Jayne Eastwood and Rudy Webb went on to significant careers in Canada.

The challenge for Nick Davis in making this film is that there is no video footage of the production, and the only audio recording was made by Short, who (without permission) clipped a couple of microphones to the set one night and plugged them into his portable cassette recorder. So we get a lot of talking head interviews from the entire company (except for Radner, who died in 1989), and some low-budget animated re-creations of key moments in the history of the production.

And in large part because this company was made up of such remarkable performers, those interviews are more than enough to tell the story in entertaining fashion. There are terrific memories of Radner's audition, which the rest of the group thought was a disaster; Martin's last-minute addition to the cast; the adjustments made when Garber left the company to make the film version of Godspell.

Not all of the memories are happy. One of the lesser-known members of the cast, Avril Chown, explains why she left show business a few years after Godspell, having dealt with sexual harrassment in her first venture into American television.

"You had to be there" moments can be frustrating for those of us who weren't. But when the members of this cast meet for a reunion, gathering around the piano to sing through the songs one more time, Davis almost manages to make us feel, just a little, as if we had been.

MOVIES: Wildwood  (2026, Travis Knight)

The latest from stop-motion animation studio Laika, and at 130 minutes, reportedly the longest stop-motion movie ever made. It's rated PG-13, and the violence and adult themes mean that it is not for the smallest children. It's a stunning piece of work.

Prue (voiced by Petyon Elizabeth Lee) is a young teen in Portland, Oregon. (That's Laika's home, and the first chunk of the movie is a loving depiction of the city.) Her parents (Jake Johnson & Maya Erskine) have warned her that her baby brother Mac must never leave the house, but when she's left to babysit, she decides to take Mac on a trip around town.

When Mac is kidnapped by a flock of crows and taken into the Impenetrable Wilderness -- a fantasy version of the forest just outside Portland -- Prue follows, accompanied by her classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay). They find a world of talking animals, including a ferocious army of coyotes who take orders from the Dowager Governess ALexandra (Carey Mulligan). It is Alexandra who has taken Mac, and Prue and Curtis must unite the rest of the forest to fight an epic battle against her.

And I do mean "epic" The final battle scene would be a massive undertaking in live action -- two armies, each with aerial support from a giant flock of birds and armed with arrows, guns, bayonets, catapults, and flaming cannonballs -- but to do it in stop-motion is astonishing, and you can understand why the movie took five years to make.

The voice cast is stellar, with small roles played by (among others) Mahershala Ali, Richard E. Grant, Angela Bassett, Awkwafina, Tom Waits, Blythe Danner, Jemaine Clement, Tantoo Cardinal, and Len Cariou.

The condensing of Colin Meloy's novel is occasionally a bit clunky, with too much background information coming in awkward dumps, and the story is a bit of a hodgepodge of elements from other fairy tales and novels. The attempts of Alexandra to sway Curtis to her side, for instance, will surely remind you of Edmund and the White Witch from the Narnia books.

But if the tropes are familiar, they are skillfully juggled; the voice cast is superb; and the animation is breathtaking. An enormous achievement, and not to be missed if you have any interest at all in animation.