Synopsis
This rock opera tells the story of one year in the life of a group of bohemians struggling in late 1980s East Village, New York, USA. The film centers around Mark and Roger, two roommates. While a tragedy has made Roger numb to new experiences, Mark begins capturing their world through his attempts to make a personal movie. In the year that follows, they and their friends deal with love, loss, and working together.
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Cast
- Anthony RappMark Cohen
- Adam PascalRoger Davis
- Rosario DawsonMimi Marquez
- Jesse L. MartinTom Collins
- Wilson Jermaine HerediaAngel Dumott Schunard
- Idina MenzelMaureen Johnson
- Tracie ThomsJoanne Jefferson
- Taye DiggsBenjamin Coffin III
- Julia RothRent Tenant
- Porscha RadcliffeRent Tenant
Recommendations
- 100
The Hollywood Reporter
One of the best film musicals in years -- exuberant, sexy and life affirming in equal measure. - 91
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Columbus is a member of the '80s generation and he gives the play authenticity, the respect of a classic, an epic visual scope and a sensibility that's blissfully free of any generational self-pity. It seems to be the movie he was born to make, and he serves it well. - 91
Entertainment Weekly
The movie is literally a series of showstoppers, unified by the impulse to turn life, at its scruffiest, into theater - into a rhapsody of the everyday. - 75
Chicago Tribune
It's a pretty good version of a pretty great stage phenomenon. - 63
Premiere
Considering how much new additions Rosario Dawson (as Mimi) and Tracie Thoms (as Joanne) bring to the film, it's a shame Columbus didn't introduce more changes. - 60
Variety
Director Chris Columbus has pasted the grungy "La Boheme" update onto film with slavish respect for the original material but a shortage of stylistic imagination and raw emotions. - 50
Village Voice
Instead of bringing a universal love story to the living present, the film traps it in a frozen past like a prehistoric bug in amber, as removed from moviegoers' experience as a dusty diorama at the American Museum of Natural History. - 50
The A.V. Club
Yes, Rent is the movie about AIDS, heroin addiction, homosexuality, strippers, marijuana, cross-dressing, and bisexuality audiences can take their grandparents to go see safe in the knowledge that any lingering trace of danger or authenticity has been carefully removed by director/co-writer Chris Columbus.
