Thirty Films That Expand the Art of the Movie Musical
movies films musicals music song dance
Richard Brody Eren Orbey Carrie Battan Françoise Mouly Louisa Thomas Condé Nast
Richard Brody lists thirty films, from 1919 to 2017, that have enriched the cinematic experience of song and dance.
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The New Yorker
Movie musicals are back in vogue. This year’s most prominent releases so far include Jon M. Chu’s film of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights,” Leos Carax’s “Annette,” and an adaptation of the recent Broadway hit “Dear Evan Hansen.” Still to come is another Miranda production, “Tick, Tick . . . BOOM!” (his directorial début), and Steven Spielberg’s remake of “West Side Story.” The trend is well timed: the intrinsic pleasure of hearing music, seeing it performed, and watching dancers in motion is a baseline of ecumenical gratification in times of trouble. (It’s no coincidence that the genre thrived during the Depression and the Second World War.) But the movie musical is as perilous as it is exhilarating, and its pitfalls are built into its glorious enticements. Singing and dancing are so intrinsically joyous to watch, so naturally suited to the medium of talking pictures, that they can lull filmmakers into passivity: just point the camera and let the pleasures unfold.

That’s what happened in the early decades of talking pictures, when musicals proliferated under mediocre direction, until they glutted the market and the genre nearly went out of business. It found new commercial life and cultural prominence, along with new inspirations, thanks to the 1933 film “42nd Street,” which featured fantastic production numbers by Busby Berkeley—but even the revitalized genre soon revealed its limitations. Fred Astaire, who rose to stardom in 1934, insisted on being filmed dancing in extended takes that simply showed his entire body in motion. “Either the camera will dance or I will,” he famously declared. His demand rendered his directors inert and his celebrated dance numbers of the thirties numbingly dull. As their example proves, the filming of music demands more than other subjects do. What the great movie musicals have in common is more than top-notch singers and dancers and songs. (Indeed, some of the greatest song-and-dance performances on film, such as those of the Nicholas Brothers, are, depressingly, filmed with little imagination.) These movies are all, first and foremost, cinematic experiences in which a concept of music is realized through images.

Which is to say that many of the films that advance the genre can’t be pigeonholed as musicals at all. The list of thirty films presented here, in chronological order, includes works by Berkeley and other auteurs of the traditional movie musical, including Stanley Donen—though not his most celebrated film, “Singin’ in the Rain,” which, great though it may be, is more inventive as a comedy than as a musical. But the list also includes dramas, documentaries, and idiosyncratic hybrid forms that put the pleasures and the performance of music front and center. (Were space no object, the list might also include great musical moments in films that are otherwise in no sense musicals, including such classic examples as Charlie Chaplin’s nonsense patter in “Modern Times,” and such surprising ones as Marianne Faithfull’s performance of “As Tears Go By” in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Made in U.S.A.”) The directors of these movies don’t just film the musical spectacles before them; they seem to reconceive the very possibilities of music on film. Their achievements suggest that, even with the current glut of movie musicals, there are possibilities for the genre yet untapped. As Al Jolson said in “The Jazz Singer,” the first musical feature, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

1. “The Oyster Princess” (1919)

This is a silent movie, but it is a virtual musical nonetheless. It was made by Ernst Lubitsch, in his native Berlin; he subsequently directed many musicals in Hollywood, with sound, but he was never so extravagantly imaginative as when he had to conjure music through images alone. The comedic story line involves an American plutocrat, Mr. Quaker, the Oyster King (Victor Janson), whose daughter, Ossi (played by Ossi Oswalda), is desperate to get married. What results is a saga of mistaken identities that culminates in a burst of effervescently erotic comedy, of the sort for which Lubitsch is justly famed. But the centerpiece of the movie is a gigantic set piece: the wedding reception, thrown for the family’s fifty closest friends, featuring a horde of servants whose ministrations are choreographed with a comedic precision. The party features a jazz band, and its conductor is played by the angular, antic Curt Bois (whose eighty-year career included “Casablanca” and “Wings of Desire”). His dance in front of the musicians is amplified wildly by what an intertitle calls a “foxtrot epidemic,” which breaks out among the guests. The dance spills over from the floor to the balcony, up and down staircases, around balustrades, with formations and gyrations that would be the envy of any filmmaker working with an actual soundtrack.

2. “Applause” (1929)

This drama, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, contains more music and dance than many musicals, and he films these sequences more movingly than most. It’s the story of a burlesque dancer named Kitty Darling (played by the billowingly melancholy Helen Morgan), who gives birth to a daughter backstage, during intermission, and raises her to be better than burlesque. But, once grown, the young woman, April Darling (Joan Peers), is tempted by the footlights—and by romance. Mamoulian, a stage director of note, offers a vivid yet disillusioned perspective, both dramatic and visual, on the energy and the degradation, the thrill and the sleaze, of the performing life. He films the smarmy cheers of spectators, the banalities pumped out onstage with desperate salesmanship, the cruel outcome when the audience grows fickle—and he does so in highly inflected images, which cram the screen with his passionate characters and their sharp gestures and expressions. The movie is an intense melodrama, with a wrenching and ironic farewell scene between April and her beau, Tony (Henry Wadsworth), set amid the banal bustle of the Times Square subway station. A climactic specialty number, performed by April, furiously captures the outrage and the derision endured onstage and off by women of the theatre.

3. “42nd Street” (1933)

This is Busby Berkeley’s first absolute classic, the one in which he found his voice and set the art and the heart of the movie musical to the beat of the title tune. (Though he directed many features from start to finish, his name is synonymous with the geometric production numbers that he conceived and directed for films in which the dramatic action was directed by others, as is the case with “42nd Street.”) Besides restoring the genre to box-office success, the movie, with its serious backstage comedy-drama (based on a fascinating and grim inside-Broadway novel by Bradford Ropes), set Berkeley’s imagination alight. He connects the rhythms of city life with the biorhythms of conscious and unconscious lust. His production numbers are mini-dramas of crushing and thrilling collective energy, capturing the struggle of individual personalities to emerge and to shine. They’re also sheer giddy leaps of observational imagination, of kaleidoscopic abstraction and wondrous transformation; Berkeley is no mere stylist of genius but a wild symbolist, a philosopher in images. The dramatic scenes, vigorously directed by Lloyd Bacon, are brought to life in tangy performances by Warner Baxter, Bebe Daniels, and Dick Powell, with comedy by Ginger Rogers, Una Merkel, Ned Sparks, and Guy Kibbee—and with the fluttery yet fiercely determined innocence of Ruby Keeler, in her first starring role.

4. “God’s Step Children” (1938)

Oscar Micheaux, the prolific and seminal Black independent filmmaker—who owned his own production company—made great silent films, but with the coming of sound his œuvre shifted. At the time, Hollywood was mostly closed to Black artists, but Micheaux turned such dramas as this one, from 1938, into virtual documentaries of Black performance—especially dance—which was otherwise going unrecorded and unpreserved. The movie, a tragedy of racial politics, social norms, and psychological frenzy, is a high-tension melodrama about a light-skinned Black baby girl, named Naomi, who is adopted into another Black family. As a child (played by Jacqueline Lewis), Naomi is desperate to pass as white—and, as an adult (Gloria Press), she is revealed to be desperately in love with her stepbrother, Jimmie (Carman Newsome). But much of the action takes place in a night club, where the music—jazz hotter than Hollywood would know—is provided by the bandleader Leon Gross, and where the dancers (the ones mentioned in the credits are Consuelo Harris, the Tyler Twins, and Sammy Gardiner) are so effortlessly and casually superior to any working in Hollywood at the time (yes, including Fred Astaire) that they make a cruel mockery of the exclusions enforced by the mainstream cinema and by American society at large.

5. “You and Me” (1938)

Bertolt Brecht wrote musicals, but perhaps the most Brechtian movie musical of all is a film made by an exile from the German cinema, Fritz Lang. The movie, which features music by Brecht’s collaborator Kurt Weill, another exile in Hollywood, tells the tale of a pair of ex-convicts (Sylvia Sidney and George Raft) who work together at a department store owned by a philanthropic capitalist (Harry Carey). The couple struggle to steer clear of criminal activity despite the predatory claim that their underworld companions have on them—and despite the obstacles posed by harsh laws and mores. With a sardonic view of ostensibly respectable society, Lang shows (as he did in “M”) the hypocritical dependence of the law-abiding world upon the knowledge, daring, and social codes of widely damned outlaws. He tells the story with extended musical scenes about crime and money, including Sprechstimme passages that are integrated into otherwise realistic action, a nearly maudlin night-club torch-song number of nonetheless harrowing intensity, and a hammeringly rhythmic prison fantasy that offers an expressionistic vision of mind-bending desperation.

6. “Dance, Girl, Dance” (1940)

The most prominent female director in classic Hollywood, Dorothy Arzner, made this musical drama about the depredations of the male gaze, decades before the term was coined (by Laura Mulvey). It stars Maureen O’Hara as a serious but poor ballet student named Judy, who, to make a living, joins a bump-and-grind burlesque show. The troupe’s brassy longtime hoofer, Bubbles (Lucille Ball), steals a job from Judy and plays a cruel trick to make her the butt of the slobbering male audience’s ridicule. The drama involves the sexual freedom flaunted by Bubbles and the sexual harassment endured by Judy. Arzner also looks candidly at the indignities endured by women during their burlesque performances—and turns a remarkably frank and disgusted spotlight onto the male spectators who ravenously stare at female flesh to feed their fantasies. The film also features plenty of dance itself—centered on the discipline and exaltation of ballet and the ennobling delights of inspired choreography—which Arzner films, lovingly and probingly, with a connoisseur’s eye.

7. “The Gang’s All Here” (1943)

It’s Busby Berkeley once again, this time in Technicolor, and directing the entire film, the dramatic scenes and the musical numbers alike. Set during the Second World War, the movie is a drawing-room comedy with a large scope of action—the tale of a soldier’s romance with a chorus girl and the complications that result when she turns up at his plutocratic father’s lavish Westchester estate for a musical war-bond drive. The story’s basis in New York night-club entertainment gives way to giddily spectacular stage productions centered on Carmen Miranda—which defy the barrier between the theatre and real life. The most famous of these sequences involves giant bananas, which are as blatantly symbolic as they are thrillingly absurd; the most intricate is the opening scene, which begins with a single face pinpointed on a dark screen, yields to geometric abstractions, and then seemingly brings a steamship into a night club in a single astoundingly conceived and executed crane shot. Berkeley displays his artistry, too, with the vertiginous filming of simple musical performances (by Benny Goodman and his band) and ballroom dance (as the performers’ shadows seem to come alive). Finally, in the wondrous concluding number, he uses pastel-toned special effects to turn the anachronistic neon tubes of a nineteenth-century polka into a speculative whirl of sociobiology in motion. The splendid cast of comedians includes Eugene Pallette, Charlotte Greenwood, and Edward Everett Horton, along with the sweet-toned yet melodramatically intense Alice Faye.

8. “Royal Wedding” (1951)

It took nearly two decades of stardom for Fred Astaire to find a director worthy of his art. Stanley Donen was all of twenty-six when he directed this comedy, which is partly based on the real-life artistic collaboration between Astaire and his sister, Adele. The story and the comedy are, unfortunately, insipid—but the dance routines, choreographed by Nick Castle, are among the most inventive ever filmed. One, aboard a tilting ship, involves rolling oranges and sliding furniture. Another features Astaire defying gravity by dancing horizontally on a room’s walls and upside down on its ceiling (a feat accomplished with a rotating room and a camera fixed to its floor). Donen deploys the devices of stagecraft—scrims and lighting tricks, ramps and sliding floors—to expand and condense space, and to hypnotically shift the rhythms with which the star threads his way through the dancing throngs. He merges Astaire’s gracefulness with athleticism and aestheticism to turn the star’s eternal ballroom charm thrillingly cinematic, at last.

9. “A Star Is Born” (1954)

The musical remake of the 1937 inside-Hollywood drama offered Judy Garland one of her greatest dramatic roles. She plays Esther Blodgett, a band singer pushed into movies by a famous actor named Norman Maine (James Mason); they marry, but his career declines, along with his dignity, as she’s launched into fame (under the studio-assigned name of Vicki Lester). The film was directed by George Cukor, whose sense of melodramatic pathos is neither understated nor hyperbolic but strong, passionate, complex. He invests the movie’s musical performances with similarly intense, pictorially rich emotion, starting with a ferocious long take of Garland singing the torch song “The Man That Got Away.” This scene, set amid the shadows of an after-hours jam session, tears through the screen with its emotional immediacy. She unleashes a similarly furious psychodramatic energy in a spectacular, quasi-autobiographical fourteen-minute production number, “Born in a Trunk,” which is part of the film within a film that turns the Hollywood newcomer into an overnight success—and which dramatizes Garland’s own life as a performer.

10. “The Pajama Game” (1957)

Choreography is useless without insightful direction to turn moves into movies. Bob Fosse was fortunate that the first film he choreographed, “The Pajama Game,” was directed by Stanley Donen, whose pictorial gifts reach new heights of textured imagination in this adaptation of a stage musical. (Donen nominally co-directed with George Abbott, who’d directed the play but kept a hands-off approach to the filming.) The story involves an impending strike in a pajama factory and the burgeoning romance between the shop’s union rep (Doris Day) and the firm’s new manager (John Raitt). Their jubilant song and dance of mutual desire is only one of the movie’s musical high points. Others include the mysteriously erotic and comedic night-club number “Hernando’s Hideaway” and the angular lurches and poses of “Steam Heat”; all embody Fosse’s graphic sensibility and bursting energy. The songs are infectious, and the cast—including the character actors Reta Shaw and Eddie Foy, Jr., and the electrifyingly impulsive, short-lived Carol Haney—display a joyful, theatrical power that Donen puts front and center. His direction does far more than merely record their exciting performances; he highlights and parses and sharpens them to high relief.

11. “The Music Room” (1958)

Satyajit Ray’s musical drama is a rapturously filmed treasure trove of great performances of Indian classical music and dance. It’s also a story of fanatical devotion. The protagonist is Biswambhar Roy (Chhabi Biswas), the hereditary landlord of a great estate, who has allowed the property to fall into ruin for his love of Hindustani classical music. Not only has he neglected his business, he has spent himself into penury in order to hold private concerts in his own music room, featuring celebrated (and well-paid) musicians, for parties of invited guests. The drama, told in flashbacks, shows the tragic wreckage resulting from his efforts to cultivate a similar love of music in his young son. Ray films musical and dramatic scenes alike with dissonant clashes of elements in unbalanced compositions, sculptural gestures, and hieratic poses. The movie’s sublime aestheticism contrasts ironically with the degradation resulting from Biswambhar’s passion for music. The climactic sequence, the height of self-immolation by way of art, runs nine minutes, and features a female dancer (Roshan Kumari) performing to live musical accompaniment. Ray’s filming of the scene, largely from a high angle—with musicians at one edge of the frame, spectators at another, and a mighty mirror, situated at the back of the music room, redoubling the dance from another perspective—is among the most original, straightforwardly visionary musical numbers I’ve ever seen in cinema.

12. “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964)

It’s obviously not the first great rock-centered musical (Frank Tashlin’s “The Girl Can’t Help It” would be high on that list), but Richard Lester’s original Beatles movie is the one that marks the epochal transformation of world views wrought by the age of rock. The film’s subject is innocuously simple: a night and a day in the lives of the Beatles, as they travel from Liverpool to London and prepare to perform on television. The action is, by and large, a cheerful romp. Yet the tone of the movie is anarchic and derisive; it heralds a joyful revolution in consciousness. The Fab Four were not the first pop musicians to provoke shrieking madness (Frank Sinatra had that effect, too), but they seem irradiated by their fame, by the world’s gaze upon them—or by the studio cameras and television sets that turn their performances into news and the news into performances, even as the musicians mock the media establishment that they were inadvertently taking over. The feedback effect of Beatlemania, the absurdist derangements that the band’s fame incites, and the fusion (and confusion) of documentary and fiction and even advertising—the movie is, after all, effectively a feature-length promotion—mesh with a jumpy, skittery, freewheeling style to declare the arrival of a new generation, one composed of self-conscious consumers no less than ironic creators.

13. “Subarnarekha” (1965)

Ritwik Ghatak’s fiercely realistic melodrama builds its stories on a tight grid of social analysis and historical events. The action begins in 1948, after the Partition of India and Pakistan, and is centered on Hindu refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). A young man named Ishwar Chakraborty (Abhi Bhattacharya), who is travelling with his younger sister, Sita, and a foundling named Abhiram, finds a job at an iron foundry and quickly advances. Years later, the grown Sita (Madhabi Mukherjee), a gifted singer, and Abhiram (Satindra Bhattacharya), an honors graduate and fledgling novelist, want to marry, but the cruel rigidity of the caste system and the corrupt practices of business get in the way. Ghatak ranges widely through Indian society to depict the ravages of economic disorder, the torments of poverty, the ambient violence. Through it all, Sita’s golden voice, passionate and solitary, fills the desolate landscape and its decrepit structures (notably, an abandoned British wartime airbase), and Ghatak films her songs with images as sharply inflected as they are intimately passionate. When she sings, her longings and observations seem to illuminate history and embody its tragedy.

14. “Original Cast Album: Company” (1970)

Stephen Sondheim’s gift to singers is passionately repaid by them, behind closed doors, in D. A. Pennebaker’s exciting and probing documentary about the recording of the LP that would preserve the show for posterity. Pennebaker roves into the control booth, where Sondheim and the record producers speak candidly about the exertions at hand. But the director devotes most of his attention to the actors and their singing. He crafts images of urgent, nervous energy that give sharp visual identity to the singers’ attentive collaboration and their ferocious yet good-humored concentration. The culminating sequence—Elaine Stritch’s late-night, self-scourging rendition of “The Ladies Who Lunch,” filmed in a single take of white-hot fury and relentless revelation—is one of the greatest moments of performance on film, and of the filming of performance. It’s all the more significant because the take, for reasons that factor into the documentary’s drama, isn’t the one that was ultimately featured on the album.

15. “Amazing Grace” (1972, 2018)

The recent rediscovery of this documentary of Aretha Franklin’s performances on two nights in 1972, at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church, in Watts—also immortalized on a record of the same title—displays her artistry with a new dimension of passion and expression. The film was directed by Sydney Pollack, who was good at comedy but a novice at documentary, and his lack of basic technical knowledge rendered the footage virtually unusable prior to the advent of digital technology and the meticulous rescue job that it enabled. What emerges from the film—produced by Alan Elliott and edited by Jeff Buchanan—is that Pollack had the basic inspirations to bring in good documentary camera operators (who, strangely, are uncredited) and to direct them on location (even on camera), insuring that the footage would reveal to the camera eye what couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. What’s more, Elliott, to whom Pollack entrusted the footage and who completed the film after the director’s death (in 2008), had the wisdom not to distract from the performances with talking heads, graphics, or any other footage extraneous to the miracle of the musical events themselves. The closeups of Franklin are among the most thrillingly intimate and screen-shatteringly intense images of performance ever filmed.

16. “At Long Last Love” (1975)

Before “Heaven’s Gate,” there was this stupendously confected musical by Peter Bogdanovich, which cost a lot of money to make and took in very little, in large part because critics were insensitive to its blend of the exquisite and the exuberant. A delicately poignant yet vigorously outgoing tale of romantic uncouplings and partner-switchings, it is told in an almost uninterrupted torrent of dance, in which the distinctive styles of the performers fuse with the characters they embody. There is Cybill Shepherd, who is still among the most underrated of sharp-pointedly precise comediennes, plus Madeline Kahn (inventive spontaneity personified), Duilio Del Prete (suave and at ease), and Burt Reynolds (self-deprecatingly, brazenly in over his head, and making up for it with bluff and knowing charm). They are put on the tightrope of Bogdanovich’s long takes, amid camera moves like whipped-cream swirls and glossy sets that reflect the action giddily back onto itself. These treasures were cast before obtuse critics (many shamefully insulted the actors), and I remain angry that this masterwork wasn’t appreciated in its time.

17. “Saturday Night Fever” (1977)

Cinematic synergy: John Travolta wasn’t known as a dancer, and John Badham had only directed one feature (and a bunch of TV movies). Nik Cohn’s vivid nonfiction piece for New York (which was subsequently revealed to have been a composite) inspired a hard-nosed script by Norman Wexler, and the on-location shoot in Brooklyn suffused the film with a documentary-like energy and atmosphere. The drama—rife with misogyny, racism, violence, and economic struggle, and centered on the rising conscience of a talented young man from narrow circumstances—bursts turbulently onto the dance floor of the Odyssey 2001 night club and the back rooms of a dance studio, creating an enduring myth of disco fever. The movie over all is a sociological time capsule, and its appalling contrast (and equally appalling connection) between life in the streets and life at the dance makes it a modern version of a classic backstage drama. Yet the movie, above all, belongs to Travolta, who delivers one of the most exhilarating of all musical performances. His sense of swing and motion, of life on the line when the music starts playing, carries over into his acting, which has a majestic rhythm and physicality to match, and which Badham’s compositional eye (and that of the cinematographer, Ralf Bode) synchs with, as if transfixed.

18. “Losing Ground” (1982)

The only full-length feature directed by Kathleen Collins (deplorably unreleased in her lifetime) is a drama of a Black intellectual New York couple, a philosophy professor named Sara (Seret Scott) and an artist named Victor (Bill Gunn), whose work and relationship are knocked out of whack during a summertime stay at a house in upstate New York. The drama is filled with music and dance—not least because the suave and worldly Victor is a good dancer, and his deft moves create dramas of their own. Then, when one of Sara’s students, George (Gary Bolling), recruits her to act in his student film, she finds herself taking part in his elaborately choreographed, historically charged, and emotionally wrenching musical—alongside another actor, Duke (Duane Jones, the star of “Night of the Living Dead” and of Gunn’s “Ganja & Hess”), whose presence sparks yet more drama. These symbolically charged scenes from the film within a film, of its rehearsal and its production, are minimally spare and maximally conceived, sensually thrilling and dramatically terrifying. They are among the most inspired musical sequences in modern cinema.

19. “One Day Pina Asked . . .” (1983)

The precise, virtually choreographic cinematic style of Chantal Akerman fuses with dance in her documentary about Pina Bausch’s company, following its rehearsals and its public performances in the summer of 1983. Most of the movie is realized in extended takes that Akerman composes and calibrates to highlight the dancers’ deft comings and goings, the intricately contrapuntal connections of their gestures. Shots peering through doorways and images parsing clusters of dancers alternate with vigorous panning shots that follow one or another dancer dashing in energetic motion. There are interviews with Bausch and the dancers and observations of backstage conversations as the company members are getting ready to perform, and their preparations bear startling resemblances to the dances themselves. They discuss and disclose the principles of their art, and Akerman, true to form, presents herself, on camera, to confess her own desire to make the film. The images are informed and energized by her imaginative sympathy.

20. “Born in Flames” (1983)

Lizzie Borden’s first dramatic feature—which she worked on for five years and completed in 1983, at the age of twenty-five—is one of the most ambitiously conceived, imaginatively produced, and thrillingly realized no-budget films. (She’s said that she shot the film in fits and starts, whenever she could scrape two hundred dollars together.) It’s set in New York ten years in the future, soon after a successful and bloodless socialist revolution that nonetheless has hardly begun to solve issues of inequality, poverty, racism, sexism, and the role of the media in state power (and vice versa). The drama teems with political action (including protests, strikes, a women’s brigade to fend off male harassers, and the occupation and sabotage of a television station) and political debate (involving the real-life activist Florynce Kennedy and matters of international revolution). Yet the entire film is physically and artistically energized by the sounds emanating from unofficial, underground radio stations run by women. The music, performed by Adele Bertei and others, is almost constant, and it puts the movie’s ideas into emotional terms, unifies its disparate modes of protest and resistance into a cultural revolution—of exactly the sort that was then taking place downtown, in real life, in the decayed and nearly bankrupt city.

21. “First Name: Carmen” (1983)

When Bizet’s “Carmen” entered the public domain, in 1980, a spate of adaptations followed, none more significant than Jean-Luc Godard’s film version, which updates the story to the eighties, moves it to Paris, and replaces most of Bizet’s music with string quartets by Beethoven. What makes it of historic import as a musical isn’t the mere use of these quartets on the soundtrack; it’s Godard’s artistry in the way that he includes and depicts the music. He doesn’t paste it onto the soundtrack; he films a real-life group, the Prat Quartet, rehearsing and performing Beethoven in a domestic space, discussing the compositions and the variety of approaches that they inspire. And Godard’s depiction of that ensemble is a revelation. Beethoven quartets have been a part of his work dating back to the early sixties, and they dominate the soundtrack of one of his greatest films, “A Married Woman,” from 1964. There, he took the quartets from records; in “First Name: Carmen,” he in effect repays the debt by cinematizing the Beethoven quartets, discovering—via the visual counterpoint that the imagery of his compositions reveals—a realm of relationships between the musicians, their instruments, and the score which add extra levels of complexity and emotion without distracting from the music itself. In effect, Godard isn’t filming the performances but participating in them. He turns himself into the quartet’s fifth member—Beethoven’s Brian Epstein.

22. “Ishtar” (1987)

Elaine May’s last feature to date, which was killed (along with her directorial career) by stiff-necked critics, is an elaborately antic musical of startling, even disturbing, originality. It’s the story of the world’s worst singer-songwriter duo (Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman), who, owing to their oblivious inability to get their careers going in New York, accept a gig in Marrakesh, Morocco. On the way, however, they get sidetracked in the neighboring (and fictitious) North African country of Ishtar, which is run by a dictator who’s opposed by local revolutionaries. Amid the sub-rosa manipulations of a revolutionary (Isabelle Adjani) and a C.I.A. agent (Charles Grodin), the musical pair find themselves secretly working on opposite sides of the conflict—yet, even when they get stranded in the desert, awaiting death in the crossfire between local rebels and American counterinsurgents, they can’t stop singing. Their terrible, unbearably catchy songs are wild works of wit, written by Paul Williams, and May exults both in them and in the possibilities that they afford for pathetically comedic performances by Beatty and Hoffman. The duo’s passion for music is unfortunately unrequited, but the joke is on us: as their performances of Williams’s songs (as well as covers of others’ hits) prove, they’re true artists in every regard except talent. May loves these intrepid losers dearly, and films their performances at a painfully ambiguous edge between comedy and tragedy. The movie is a howlingly funny yet bitter recognition that anything worth doing well is worth failing at, too, and that what separates the failures from the true luminaries is often the merest turn of the existential screw.

23. “School Daze” (1988)

Spike Lee followed “She’s Gotta Have It” with this dramatic musical, set at the fictitious Mission College, a historically Black school, and centered on the emotional and sexual cruelty of its social life and its fraternities. The action focusses on political protest, prejudice against queer students and against those with darker skin (or, for that matter, reverse prejudice against those with lighter skin), and the students’ conflicts with wider, off-campus society. The tough-minded story, which sparkles ironically with the classic exuberance of collegiate comedies, is filled with music and dance: a sorority showdown dance-off at a beauty salon, a mighty fraternity step-off before a critical crowd, vigorous and sentimental performances onstage, a marching band and cheerleaders, a late-night torch procession, and a performance, at a homecoming dance, of a song that came back at this year’s Oscars, “Da Butt.” These production numbers establish the tone of the story, but they also fulfill a documentary function, which is amplified by a sense of history highlighted in the movie’s opening montage, set to the spiritual “I’m Building Me a Home.” Lee candidly spotlights the culture and the creativity of young Black Americans and foregrounds the role of the H.B.C.U. in forging their legacies—and their future.

24. “Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1988)

Terence Davies, one of the great dramatic directors, finds his prime inspirations in music, starting with the Hollywood musicals of the nineteen-fifties that he grew up with. His movies are filled with music, and his filming of musical performance is as consistently, joltingly original as his approach to purely dramatic material. His first feature, from 1988, is an autobiographical drama that reconstructs his home life, as a schoolboy, in a working-class neighborhood in Liverpool, under the terrifying rule of his abusive father—and then, after his father’s sudden death, in the mournful yet loving home that’s run by his widowed mother. Davies’s exalted style of urgent closeups and rhapsodically gliding camera moves is matched to a ferocious emotional and practical realism, and that blend informs the movie’s distinctive mode of musical performance. The circle of family, friends, and neighbors is a musical bunch—at get-togethers at home and in pubs, socializing involves singing popular show tunes and folk songs, especially for the women of the group. Davies stages these sing-alongs with actors performing, a cappella, live on camera, and he films them with a rapt and grateful devotion. For the young character whom Davies remembers himself to be, the women’s singing is a lesson in artistic sensibility and transcendent emotion, a momentary lifting out of the daily grind and into a secular state of grace.

25. “Alexandria: Again and Forever” (1989)

The Egyptian director Youssef Chahine had a career-long passion for filming musical performance. This quasi-autobiographical fantasy is the second part in a trilogy about the life, and the professional and personal struggles, of a filmmaker named Yehia. It’s the only installment in which Chahine himself plays the character, and it’s a musical of conceptual audacity and moment-to-moment inventiveness. Yehia is undergoing a terrible breakup—a younger male actor, something of his muse, has quit their planned production because of “the rumors,” and Yehia’s wife, Gigi (Menha Batraoui), threatens to leave him if he runs after the other man. The musical numbers include a flashback to the productive and stormy collaboration—complete with Yehia’s soft-shoe routine, on a staircase, at night, outside the Berlin Film Festival—and an extravagant musical interpretation of the life of Alexander the Great, in which Yehia again appears, with a sublime incongruity. Yet the imaginative leaps of fancy, filmed with decorative style and bold anachronism, also push the drama ahead into defiantly political territory, to address the heavy-handed control that the Egyptian government exerts over the movie business. Chahine’s vision is audaciously comprehensive, a fusion of politics and imagination, romance and art.

26. “Siddheshwari” (1989)

Mani Kaul was one of cinema’s great visual artists. Working with low budgets, he created ecstatic and dynamic images that are themselves a kind of music for the eyes. In this docu-fiction, he turns his attention to music itself, in dramatic reënactments of scenes from the life and legend of the great classical singer Siddheshwari Devi (1908-77). The story follows Siddheshwari’s childhood, as an orphan who was raised with her cousin and picked up music on her own; her apprenticeship to a master musician; and her transmission of musical knowledge to her daughter Savita, also a real-life musician. Kaul presents these episodes with performances onscreen that are synched to Siddheshwari’s real-life recordings, and also with sequences that the credits call “film-improvisation,” in which he depicts urban alleys and byways and life along the Ganges. His images of the river are as poetic and rhapsodic as those of the fictionalized Siddheshwari, who is shown in her solitary contemplations and her family relationships. The film builds to a powerful documentary ending as the actress Mita Vashisht, who portrays the adult Siddheshwari, goes to a television studio and watches video of the real-life and elderly Siddheshwari in performance. Kaul films Vashisht there in images of melodramatic power to rival those of any fiction.

27. “The Wayward Cloud” (2005)

Porn meets popcorn in Tsai Ming-liang’s astounding fusion of exuberance and melancholy, exaltation and despair. In a numbingly desolate Taipei housing complex, a lonely woman, an adult-video-store clerk, lives alone in an apartment. In the unit above hers, a hardcore pornography film is being made. She meets a man whom she used to know when he was a street vender. Now, unbeknownst to her, he’s one of the stars of the porn film. The movie’s long takes of slow action exude solitude and frustration and lives on hold. The scenes are punctuated by music-video-like production numbers, featuring peppy and catchy pop tunes, choreographed sometimes just with the giddy glee of twirling watermelon-pattern umbrellas and perky dances, and sometimes with sex—as in a version of “Sixteen Tons” performed in a men’s bathroom and featuring a male singer and dancer who is dressed as a giant penis. The dramatic scenes are sometimes worse than forgettable—they’re as jejune in their sexuality as, say, the drama of “Royal Wedding” is with its romance. But the musical numbers are the film’s raison d’être, and they do more than fuse the movie’s erotic subjects with a dream world of imagined joy. They take the classical style to new heights by making its subordinated or symbolized sexuality explicit. It’s like Busby Berkeley on truth serum.

28. “The Silence Before Bach” (2007)

Pere Portabella, a ninety-two-year-old Catalan director and producer who worked with Luis Buñuel, has made fictional films of Surrealist inspirations as well as bold and confrontational political documentaries. This film, a quasi-documentary fantasy, which he made at the age of eighty, fuses both of these inclinations by way of music. It’s a series of disparate set pieces loosely linked by the subject of Bach’s music, and it explores the connection, from the composer’s own period through contemporary times, between European culture and politics. Bach’s music is realized in a variety of idiosyncratic ways: a player piano rolling on its own across the open space of a studio, a dozen or more young cellists performing a suite aboard a moving subway train, the harpsichordist and organist Christian Brembeck portraying Bach performing in a church and giving one of his sons a harpsichord lesson at home. There’s a reënactment of the legend of Felix Mendelssohn (Daniel Ligorio) discovering a work of Bach’s by getting meat from his butcher wrapped in a sheet of the manuscript score. There’s a view of the imposing castle in Leipzig where the Goldberg Variations were commissioned and performed. There’s a scene of a bookseller recalling the abuse of classical music in Auschwitz. Over all, the film conveys the sense of a continent that derives its enduring self-image from the distant glories and enduring flame of Bach’s music, and also of the horrific history that Europeans looking to sustain that self-image must own up to and live down.