My dad used to skip every musical number when we watched movies together, hitting fast forward the second someone opened their mouth to sing. I used to fight him on it every time. Then one night we watched Cabaret, and about halfway through, there’s a scene where a blond boy stands up in a beer garden and starts singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” It sounds sweet at first, like any old folk song. Then the camera pulls back slowly, and you see the armband on his sleeve, and you realize everyone around him has stopped eating and started singing along with him. No one touched the remote for that one.
That’s the moment I understood what a song in a movie can actually do that a normal scene absolutely can’t. It can let something build in the background while you’re still humming along, so that by the time you notice what’s really happening, you’re already part of it. Not every musical bothers to use that trick. The ten movies on this list all do, in one way or another so let’s get into it.
10
‘Pennies from Heaven’ (1981)
Image via MGM
Arthur Parker (Steve Martin) sells sheet music for a living, but in his head, he’s always somewhere better, living inside old pop songs instead of dealing with his own life. His real life keeps getting worse though, since he cheats on his wife, loses his job, and then gets blamed for a murder he didn’t do. Every time something bad happens, Pennies from Heaven switches to a bright musical number, and it almost feels like the songs are teasing him, and promising a happy ending they never plan to give him.
Joan (Bernadette Peters) and Tom (Christopher Walken) both get dragged into Arthur’s mess along the way, but neither one can save him in the end. Arthur is wrongly convicted and executed, and since most musicals end with a wedding or a big dance, watching this one end with a death feels like the movie broke a promise it never should have made.
9
‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’ (1964)
Image via 20th Century Studios
Nobody in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg speaks a single line out loud. Even a simple sentence like “pass the sugar” gets sung, which makes the film like a fairy tale from the very first scene. Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve) and Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) fall in love fast, the way young people often do, but the war takes Guy away right when things are just getting good between them.
While Guy is gone, Geneviève finds out she’s pregnant, and even though she waits for him as long as she can, she ends up marrying someone else instead. Guy comes home eventually and builds his own life too, and years later, when they run into each other again, there’s no big reunion, just two people being polite and that underestimation of everything makes you sad. The songs stay sweet the whole time, but the story underneath them still manages to break your heart.
8
‘Cabaret’ (1972)
Image viaAllied Artists
The characters in Cabaret only sing when they’re on stage at the Kit Kat Klub. Everywhere else, they just talk like regular people. Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) works as a singer there, and she falls for Brian Roberts (Michael York), while the Emcee (Joel Grey) hosts every show with a grin that never seems to drop, even as the world outside gets darker by the day.
While Sally and Brian fall for each other, the Nazis are quietly gaining power in the background, and the club just keeps singing like nothing outside its doors is changing. The film also doesn’t look away from Brian’s bisexuality or Sally’s abortion, both bold subjects for a mainstream movie in 1972. By the end, the fun on stage and the fear building outside sit side by side, and you can tell which one is losing.
7
‘South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut’ (1999)
Image via Paramount Pictures
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut takes four foul-mouthed cartoon kids and gives them real Broadway-style songs, and Trey Parker, who voices most of the cast, fills the lyrics with swear words and jokes about censorship. The film almost got banned over its rating, so in a way, the whole thing plays like one long joke aimed straight at the people who tried to stop it.
Even with all the crude jokes, the songs are actually well written, catchy enough that you’ll be humming them for days after you watch. That’s probably why “Blame Canada” got nominated for an Oscar, swearing and all. Cartoons are supposed to be safe for kids, but this one refuses to behave, and it laughs at anyone who still expects it to.
6
‘Moulin Rouge!’ (2001)
Image via 20th Century Studios
Moulin Rouge! takes songs by Elton John, Nirvana, and Madonna and drops them into Paris in 1899, so Satine (Nicole Kidman), a singer at the club, and Christian (Ewan McGregor), a writer who falls for her, end up falling in love to music that shouldn’t even exist yet in their world. The songs blend together fast, and the camera cuts even faster, so the whole film feels like it’s moving faster than it can really handle and that thing was way ahead of its time.
It also keeps breaking the fourth wall, making fun of musicals even while it’s busy being one itself. Satine dies at the end, which is an old, worn-out idea for stories about women like her, but because the rest of the film is already so loud and messy, even that old idea looks different and doesn’t feel cliche.
5
‘All That Jazz’ (1979)
Image via 20th Century Fox
All That Jazz is basically Bob Fosse telling his own story, since Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) is a choreographer who works too hard, sleeps around too much, and pops pills just to get through each day. Angelique (Jessica Lange) is actually Death, and Joe talks to her like an old friend the whole movie, which somehow makes his slow decline feel almost normal instead of scary.
The film never tries to fix Joe or make him likable before it ends. Instead, it lets him keep wearing himself down until his own funeral turns into a full musical number, with lights, dancers, and a big finish. Watching a man dance toward his own death, and seem to enjoy it, is hard to sit through, especially since Fosse made this only a few years before he actually died.
4
‘Dancer in the Dark’ (2000)
Image via Constantin Film
Selma (Björk) works in a factory and is slowly going blind, and whenever her life gets too hard to handle, she imagines a musical number in her head just to survive the moment. Kathy (Catherine Deneuve) is her closest friend, while Bill (David Morse) is the neighbor whose lie ends up ruining everything Selma has left.
Unlike most musicals, the dream scenes in Dancer in the Dark are shot on shaky, cheap-looking cameras instead of anything smooth, and unlike most musicals, this story doesn’t end well either. Selma is executed near the end, and the film even cuts her last song short before it finishes, so it gives you hope the whole way through only to take it back at the last second. Björk later said the role took so much out of her that she never wanted to act again.
3
‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch’ (2001)
Image via New Line Cinema
Hedwig Robinson (John Cameron Mitchell) is a rock singer from East Germany who had a surgery that didn’t go as planned after she moved to the West chasing love and freedom. The songs in Hedwig and the Angry Inch are part glam rock, part punk confession, and underneath the noise, they’re really about her looking for the man who stole her music and her heart, a guy named Tommy Gnosis.
Yitzhak (Miriam Shor) is Hedwig’s bandmate and husband, and he stays quietly hurt and jealous through the whole story, even while he keeps performing next to her every night. The film also uses the fall of the Berlin Wall to talk about Hedwig’s own body, and how she never quite feels whole no matter how loud she sings. It started out as a small stage show, but it’s become something people who feel out of place still hold onto.
2
‘Repo! The Genetic Opera’ (2008)
Image via Twisted Pictures
Repo! The Genetic Opera is set in a future where organs fail all the time, and a company run by Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino) takes those organs back by force if you miss a payment, no matter how much you beg. Nathan (Anthony Head) does the repossessing in secret, while his daughter Shilo (Alexa Vega) has no idea what her father actually does once he leaves the house.
Every surgery and every betrayal is sung, not spoken, mixing metal, opera, and horror into one loud, bloody story that feels a little too good to watch considering its subject. Blind Mag (Sarah Brightman) plays a singer whose career is fading fast, and Amber Sweet (Paris Hilton) shows up as a woman addicted to plastic surgery, whose face falls apart right on stage. It’s extreme on purpose, but underneath all the blood, it’s really just a sad story about a father trying to protect his daughter.
1
‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ (1975)
Image via 20th Century Studios
Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry) is a scientist in fishnets and heels who lures in a young couple, Brad (Barry Bostwick) and Janet (Susan Sarandon), after their car breaks down near his castle one stormy night. The Rocky Horror Picture Show makes fun of old horror movies and old love stories at the same time.
What turned it into a legend wasn’t just the movie itself, though. Fans started showing up to midnight showings dressed as the characters, shouting lines at the screen, and throwing rice and toast at just the right moments. Long before it was common, this film let its characters be openly queer and play with gender without apologizing for any of it, which is probably why, fifty years later, people are still showing up to watch it every single weekend.
