‘Liza: A really great, absolutely true story’ Review: Minnelli in close -up | Reviews

You: Bruce David Klein. US. 2025. 104 minutes

Liza Minnelli has been giving us the old Razzle blending for decades and she remains a magnetic presence in the heart of this cozy and catchy celebration of her life and work. She is in Bruce David Klein’s documentary by a choir of old friends – both famous and not – who are more chronologically concerned with about her life, about what some of her greatest hits as a prospect of exploring the influences that could shape their talent.

Klein has a strong understanding of the entire material

After the documentary was premiered in Tribeca last year, he has since sent it on the festival racetrack with his latest curtain in Thessaloniki. It has a warm reception of US fans since his zeitgeist publication in January in the USA and can repeat the performance in other territories by dogwoof.

Klein, who previously profiled rocker hacking (Hack frying: Looking for paradise2007) and American businessman Carl Icahn (Icahn: The restless billionaire2022) mainly focuses on the decade after the death of Minnelli’s mother Judy Garland in 1969 when Minnelli was only 23 years old Gigi The director Father Vincente Minnelli finds her own voice, as the American songbook could say.

The director’s cherry picking approach means that many things are on the track-in Minnelli’s role towards Dudley Moore is not mentioned in 1981. ArthurFor example or her later time as Lucille Austero in Arrested development. The Plus page is that small and its contributors are more space for certain aspects of Minnelli’s rise to fame and the emotional and professional influence of key people in their lives.

Rising to fame may not be a term that should be used for Minnelli because it was essentially born in it. The early part of her life was influenced by Garland’s well -documented problems. One of the archive materials of the film is the moment when Minnelli sang with her mother in the London Palladium in 1964, the voice of the young woman, who already has a show stopper. Clamps like this not only celebrated a celebration of her natural talent, but also a springboard for participants, including singers, pianist and close friend Michael Feinstein to offer psychological observations. In this case, it becomes a dissection of Garland’s fewer supporters reaction to your daughter, who receives applause.

In chapter under the direction of direct quotations, including “emphasize what is good. What you don’t like, change it. “Klein illuminates the most important mentors in Liza’s life by singer and singing coach Kay Thompson, who became a surrogate mother after Garland’s death cabaret Director/choreographer Bob Fosse, French singer Charles Aznavour and fashion designer Halston. Other respondents are lifelong buddy, the actor Mia Farrow, cabaret Co-star Joel Gray and half-sister Lorna air.

Minnelli’s careful approach is shown in the way they instruct small, move the camera and notices that she does so, even though she is “her mother’s daughter”, there is also a large part of her father in there. “Liza will never go in front of the camera and talk about the dirt,” we are said, and that seems to be true, even though her Coteria is more willing to fill the gaps. While the film does not fully gloss over its numerous romantic relationships, Klein’s faster approach refuses to leave the focus on Liza’s stage and on-screen talent for a long time.

The director also uses statements from clips from an extensive archive. We see repeatedly how Minnelli does questions about her mother, a tip from which she learned cabaret And Liza with AZ Copywriter Fred Ebb. The susceptibility to security that some of your friends refer to, also comes through, even in previously invisible backstage film material of a European tour. In the meantime, their star quality shines and sparkles in a wealth of clips from stage shows and films, including cabaret and Martin Scorsese New York, New York.

Klein has a strong understanding of the entire material, and the editors Jake Keen and Alexander J Goldstein carefully cut it together so that the past and the present often meet. This moves particularly at a moment when Liza sings while Michael plays the piano, interferes with older shots of her singing of the same song and ensures a moving duet. Although Klein gallops past certain parts of her biography, Klein also discovers a lot of details. Robert de Niros Hass on the first incarnation of New York, New YorkFor example, or Halston’s decision to create your Signature -Pailletten -Look because it would not show the sweat.

This last observation speaks for the sheer weight of the effort that Minnelli has got up in the years. It may have been born in the spotlight. But she is the one who made it her own.