Great musicals aren’t just limited to the classic eras of film history
In the history of American film, the golden age for the movie musical ended in the late 1960s. A new age of filmmaking was emerging in this era, one that was emphasizing grimy reality over lavish old-fashioned stories about people singing and dancing their way through troubles.
However, in the 21st-century, a genre once thought to be dead has managed to make a comeback at the movie theater. Film adaptations of broadway musicals like Chicago and Les Miserables have scored equal measures of success financially and in award season, proving that the movie musical was merely in hibernation for so long rather than deceased.
The musical film has become so prominent in the modern age that it can be difficult to discern what to watch. How can one figure out what to view without stepping into a subpar entry in the genre like Cats or The Prom? This list will help.
Ahead, we’ll look at the eight best modern movie musicals of all time and the qualities that make them stand out as such superb examples of what this medium of storytelling can accomplish. Laying them all out like this, it's astounding to see the variety of genres and moods the musical can inhabit.
A note before moving forward: America is not the only place producing great modern musical movies. It would be a tragedy not to recognize the accomplishments of musicals made outside of North America and Europe.
While I have not personally been exposed to many of these titles, some 21st-century foreign-language musical features that have scored widespread acclaim include Stilyagi, 3 Idiots, La France, and Om Shanti Om.
Now, on to the list proper, which begins with one of the most recent entries in the world of cinematic musicals . . .
In the Heights
From its very first scene, In the Heights establishes itself as an unabashedly extravagant musical that can find a catchy tune in anything. Just people getting ready for work at their 9-to-5 jobs inspires the titular musical number "In the Heights" while contemplations over what one would do with the loot from a winning lottery ticket inspire "96,000," a set-piece full of power, energy, and hopeful joy. Even just the sight of fireworks getting launched is reason enough to get characters singing.
In the hands of director Jon M. Chu, everyday life is the perfect backdrop for a vibrant musical just bursting with life. Chu also shows remarkable imagination in bringing this story from the stage to the big screen. Characters sing up the sides of buildings and move through a subway station representing various parts of life in ways that could only be possible with the magic of cinema.
A roster of wonderful performances only further accentuates the irresistible humanity of the piece, with Olga Merediz as “Abuella” Claudia being a standout in a movie stacked with memorable actors. Needless to say, In the Heights is a tremendous feat and a modern musical that touches your heart as often as it inspires your head to bop along to the beat of its catchy songs.
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Anna & The Apocalypse
Christmas, zombies, and musicals. Those are three very distinct entities that one wouldn’t immediately assume would all blend together. But the 2018 feature Anna & The Apocalypse did just that, laying a young woman’s journey into discovering the importance of standing up for concrete causes against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse occurring just as the most wonderful time of the year is underway. Oh, and also, everybody’s singing tunes that make no bones about being over-the-top musical numbers.
Anna & The Apocalypse wholly commits to its weirdo sensibilities and that’s what makes it such a blast to watch. It helps too that the characters are people we’re meant to get invested in rather than just walking platters of flesh for zombies to eventually devour. Similarly, the song-and-dance routines aren’t phoned-in ditties mocking musical numbers. Splashy set pieces like "Hollywood Ending" are incredibly fun and very well-written tunes that would fit in any professional musical. Anna & The Apocalypse stirs together a lot of disparate ingredients to create a genre-bending Yuletide offering that’s undeniably irresistible.
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Sing Street
When you’re a teenager, the rebellious sounds of a good song can be the only way you can properly express your contempt for authority—or any other emotion, for that matter. The importance of music is on full display in Sing Street, a feature from writer/director John Carney about a teenager in 1980s Ireland who puts together his own ramshackle rock band. They’re far from the next iteration of The Who but the work of these angsty adolescents embodies how songs can be the perfect vessel to express feelings we’d never be able to convey in simple words.
Carney’s apparent affection for these oddball characters is as palpable as it is infectious. Sing Street is the best kind of crowdpleaser, a film that earns its audience emotional investment and then some. It helps, of course, that there are several great songs on the soundtrack, including the mid-movie showstopper ditty "Drive It Like You Stole It." One of the more egregious Best Original Song Academy Award snubs in history, "Drive It Like You Stole It" is absolutely rocking and makes for a fantastic musical number.
Throw in a slew of great performances from the cast, especially Jack Reynor in a career-best turn as the protagonist’s older brother, and you’ve got a musical full of rebellion and spirit!
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Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
Given their success as the creators of Digital Shorts for Saturday Night Live, it’s remarkable we’ve only gotten one musical from the comedy music group The Lonely Island. But the sole musical the trio has delivered was a comedy for the ages as well as a feature packed to the gills with catchy ditties.
The ingenious stroke of Popstar is how, on the surface, it seems like a skewering of mid-2010s pop music trends, but the entire project is far more timeless than that. The gags, performances, and even moments of triumph for the characters can resonate with all viewers regardless of their knowledge of mid-2010s Billboard chart-topping tunes.
This extends to the music, which constantly delivers songs as foul-mouthed as they are ingeniously crafted. Even tunes that didn’t make the final cut, like "F*** Off," are winners, while the ones that ended up on the screen, like "Incredible Thoughts," will be stuck in your brain for ages. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping isn’t just one of the greatest musical comedies, it’s also a feature-length demonstration of why we need more Lonely Island movies.
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La La Land
Forever and ever, La La Land will be inextricably tied to the unforgettable moment when it was briefly crowned the winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture before Moonlight was revealed to be the actual victor. It’s a pity that that’ll forever define La La Land’s reputation since Damien Chazelle’s homage to the Golden Age of musicals has plenty to offer beyond setting up viral Oscar moments. Chiefly, it’s just a gorgeous-looking affair, a fascinating departure from Chazelle’s other works as a filmmaker rooted in discernible reality. By contrast, La La Land unabashedly embraces vivid colors seemingly ripped from the age of CinemaScope.
It helps too that lead actors like Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are perfectly cast, capturing the aura of classic movie stars while offering a distinctly modern sensibility in their exploration of how pursuing our dreams never goes exactly as we expect.
Even the songwriting duo Pasek & Paul, whose work in films can sometimes lean too heavily on creating generic pop tracks, deliver memorable tunes, particularly the achingly vulnerable "Audition (The Fools Who Dream") or the jubilant "Someone in the Crowd." La La Land is a rare musical that has one foot rooted in the past while offering plenty of unique things for a new generation of moviegoers to call their own.
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The Muppets
After a decade off the silver screen, The Muppets returned in a 2011 film. One of the most significant members of the filmmaking team was songwriter Bret McKenzie who was tasked with crafting tunes that could follow in the footsteps of tracks like "The Rainbow Connection." McKenzie actually managed to live up to the musical legacy of these characters simply by remembering that The Muppets are not just lazy kid-friendly fodder.
Songs like "Me Party" and "Man or Muppet" have witty wordplay that can impress moviegoers of all ages. And who isn’t going to grow a big grin after listening to the delightful opening number "Life’s A Happy Song?" So much went oh so right with The Muppets but McKenzie’s songwriting skills were especially critical in making sure this movie worked as well as it did.
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Hedwig and the Angry Inch
I’ll never forget the first time I watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch and being repeatedly blown away by what I was watching. I’d never seen a musical like this, one that expressed concepts and ideas relegated to subtext, at best, in other musical movies. While some entries in this genre tiptoe around the notion of queerness, writer/director John Cameron Mitchell takes the pronounced energy of rock n’ roll to make Hedwig and the Angry Inch a musical that doesn’t just acknowledge but celebrates the concept of breaking down society's sexual and gender norms.
This is especially apparent in "Wig in a Box," a masterpiece of a sequence that’s up there with the likes of Singin’ in the Rain as one of the all-time great movie musical numbers. The lyrics of this tune being as insightful as they are witty alone would be enough to make it an all-timer.
However, there’s also the fact that the escalating level of energy in the song makes for a perfect representation of how the film’s titular character Hedwig has grown to accept herself throughout her life. This level of thought and craft permeates the rest of the movie’s song and dance routines, which make use of varied visual styles and heightened imagery to craft musical numbers like no others in the history of cinema.
Hedwig is a film character like no other so it’s only appropriate that she got to headline an idiosyncratic musical like Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
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The Lure
Come 2022, moviegoers around the world will likely be lining up to see Disney’s live-action take on its animated movie The Little Mermaid. If recent remakes of Disney cartoons are any indication, it’ll be full of character designs that try to make stylized animals creepily realistic and musical numbers captured through clumsy camerawork. How about giving that movie a skip and instead partake in Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s bold reinvention of The Little Mermaid entitled The Lure? It may not have "Part of Your World," but it’s a musical from Poland that’s got weirdness a-plenty.
The tunes in Lure range from traditional lavish song-and-dance numbers with accompanying crowds of backup singers to hardcore metal songs sung in seedy locales. Like everything else in this imaginative production, the songs in The Lure are meant to keep you on your toes and constantly unsure of what’s coming next. In between all the sexually charged set-pieces and warped musical numbers, The Lure even manages to deliver some surprisingly accurate recreations of key plot points from Hans Christian Anderson’s original Little Mermaid text. Let’s all make a promise to eschew the inevitably hollow live-action retread of Disney’s past and instead partake in the bizarre but captivating musical vision of The Lure.
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