"Cabaret" is not so much a movie musical as it is a movie with a lot of music in it…. Fosse's approach has been not to open up but rather to confine, on a small and well-defined stage, as much of "Cabaret" as means to be musical theater.

Thus the film has a musical part and a nonmusical part …, and if you add this to the juxtaposition of private lives and public history inherent in the scheme of the "Berlin Stories" [on which the film is based], you come up with a structure of extraordinary mechanical complexity. Since everything has to do with everything else and the Cabaret is always commenting on the life outside it, the film sometimes looks like an essay in significant cross-cutting, or associative montage. Occasionally this fails; more often it works.

Fosse makes mistakes, partly because his camera is a more potent instrument...