United States

All the razzamatazz of E.L. Doctorow's best-selling novel bursts on to the screen in Milos Foreman's dazzling kaleidoscope portrait of America in the early 1900s. An intoxicating mixture of fact and fiction, featuring the real-life scandal of chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit - whose crazy rich husband shot her former lover in public - and the outbreak of urban terrorism - as the black piano player Coalhouse Walker seeks revenge for damage to his Model T Ford - 'Ragtime' brilliantly captures an age of dire poverty and fabulous wealth.