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"Cyrano" has all that. It's a date movie, but you won't need a date if you can lead with your sentimental side watching alone or with a random moviegoing buddy. It's also a fast-paced action movie, a war-is-hell movie, and a tearjerker, with too many quick comic riffs (none in the wrong places) to count. The first 20 minutes are crowded and raucous, and it's all fun & games until . . . Well, you'll see.

It has a few songs, including a heartbreaking antiwar song sung by dutiful soldiers. (Reviewers here who didn't like the songs may have been disappointed not to hear classic, hummable show tunes. Their loss.) Apparently "Cyrano" was poised to go to Broadway with this cast, but the pandemic chased them to Sicily for gorgeous immersive location shooting. That's our good fortune.

P.s.: If you liked "Atonement," the same director made both movies; both involve fateful letters. If you liked "Roxanne," as I did, there's room in your heart to like this, too.

It's impressive to watch a gaggle of Broadway's best, at almost the exact moment the clock moved from the 1960s into the '70s, take their places in a featureless recording studio to make history. The original cast, the orchestra players, the sound engineers, composer Stephen Sondheim, and session producer Thomas Shepard demonstrate more than great talent and love for what they're doing. They give a master class in how to listen, how to give and take direction, how to hit the creators' target. Near the end, when Ms. Stritch belts out a solo for the ages at 3 a.m., the producer criticizes her delivery, and I wanted to smack him! But I'm not a theater person, unlike the phenomenal troupers who kept soaking up instructions and doing more, more, more takes till everyone was happy. They did it right.

If you own any original cast recording of a Broadway musical, I recommend this behind-the-scenes look at how one OCR was made.

I was a regular MTM watcher in the first few years, and this is the episode I remember best. Geek with a crush was a novelty back then as a romantic lead, as opposed to some clownish regular cast member's crush of the week, and even as a high schooler I noticed Paul Sand's endearing comic chops. (His trench coat looked like he picked it up at Lt. Columbo's yard sale.) Sand's kept fitfully busy in movies and TV over the decades but I don't think I saw him in anything after this. His performance, together with Mary's and Rhoda's and the unforgettable chocolate-to-hips, made all the show's subsequent coulda-been romances seem flat and formulaic. For me, this is the best episode to keep the focus on Mary's home life.