Movie magic. What is it? A good description, maybe, would be this: “When the elements of a film come together to deliver an experience that feels very special.” In other words, you feel more like you experienced something magical and not that you simply watched a good movie. “Casablanca” is one example.

There are a lot of bad movies, a lot of mediocre movies, some very good movies, a few excellent movies, and a very few magical, timeless movies. During 2022, in which this reviewer saw “Casablanca” and wrote this review, we had “Nope,” an excellent movie, and “The Black Phone,” a very good movie, among others. Magical? Out of the ones that came out in 2022, I’d say, “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once” comes closest to having that magical, timeless quality, but I don’t know if I’d go as far to say that it’s there.

Like “Casablanca.”

“Casablanca,” at face value, doesn’t seem like a candidate for greatness. If you divide it up into its individual elements, everything in it is either very good or excellent—the acting, excellent; the dialog, excellent; the direction, very good; and so forth. But no individual element seems to highly surpass, as Anthony Hopkin’s performance did in “The Silence of the Lambs.” No individual element of “Casablanca” seems great; excellent, yes, but great? And the plot of “Casablanca” revolves around a guy trying to get his transit papers. Doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? And since the movie’s 1943 release, world culture has been inundated with clips and sayings from the movie (Bogart in the trench coat, “Play it again, Sam,” “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid,” etc.), so most people have some familiarity with its iconography without really knowing what it’s about. And if I were to get into details about the plot, that it involves a disaffected American nightclub owner in Morocco whose path gets crossed by a former lover who had jilted him, well, it probably wouldn’t convince you any further to watch the movie.

But everything in the movie just comes together to create movie magic: Humphrey Bogart’s tough guy with a broken heart, a supporting cast of sleazy characters, the heroic nobility of the French resistance fighter who is married to the aforementioned former lover of Bogart’s character, Bogart’s African-American piano-playing faithful buddy whose tunes cut to the heart of the movie, and many other elements all fall in place like notes in a musical symphony.

The more you try to analyze the movie and compare it with others, the more you realize that there’s no true reason why this movie is such a magical experience. Yes, the elements are excellent, but there are many other movies over the years also with excellent elements but that don’t have that same magic; they’re very good, or even excellent, but not magical. Greatness is not a sum of a movie’s great parts.

Ultimately, there is no real, logical explanation for true movie magic. Some movies, very few movies, just capture lightning in a bottle. This is one of them.

Casablanca (1942) 98%