Singin' in the Rain

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• Top 6 Movie Musicals of All Time

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• The Sound of Music

  The Sound of Music, released in 1965 and based on the real story of the Austrian von Trapp family, became one of the highest-grossing films of all time at the point of its release, and its filming locations across Salzburg, Austria remain major tourist attractions built substantially around the film's continued popularity. Julie Andrews's performance as Maria, a postulant nun who becomes governess to a widowed naval officer's seven children, won her widespread acclaim, and the film's songs, including "Do-Re-Mi" and "Edelweiss," became some of the most widely recognized musical theater songs ever adapted for film. The film's backdrop, set against the rising threat of Nazi annexation of Austria in the years just before World War II, gave its otherwise lighthearted family musical narrative a serious historical weight, culminating in the von Trapp family's dramatic escape over the Alps to avoid Nazi conscription. Its enduring popularity, including annual televised broadcasts and sing-along theatrical screenings that continue decades after its original release, has made The Sound of Music one of the most continuously beloved and commercially successful movie musicals in film history.

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• West Side Story

  West Side Story, released in 1961, adapted the Broadway musical's reimagining of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet into a story of rival New York City street gangs, and its filming took place on real Upper West Side blocks that were being demolished at the time to make way for the construction of Lincoln Center. The film's Jerome Robbins choreography, blending ballet technique with street-inspired movement, set new technical standards for film musical dance sequences, and Robbins's insistence on extensive rehearsal time and multiple takes reportedly contributed to significant production delays and budget overruns during filming. Its score, composed by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by a young Stephen Sondheim in one of his earliest major professional credits, is widely regarded as one of the greatest musical theater scores ever written, blending Latin rhythms with more traditional Broadway orchestration to reflect the story's Puerto Rican and Anglo-American character conflict. The film won 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and Steven Spielberg's critically acclaimed 2021 remake introduced the story to a new generation of audiences, reflecting the original's lasting influence on how film musicals could address serious social themes like racial tension and urban gang violence within a musical theater format.

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• Grease

  Grease, released in 1978 and based on the 1971 stage musical, became the highest-grossing movie musical in history at the time of its release, and its soundtrack, featuring songs performed by stars John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, produced multiple chart-topping singles that extended the film's cultural reach well beyond typical movie musical audiences. The film's 1950s nostalgic setting, depicting American high school greaser and preppy subcultures, tapped into a broader wave of 1950s nostalgia across American popular culture during the late 1970s, and Grease's success significantly contributed to that broader cultural moment's mainstream momentum. Its blend of relatively catchy, radio-friendly pop songwriting with traditional musical theater structure gave Grease crossover appeal beyond typical musical theater fans, helping the soundtrack achieve mainstream pop chart success independent of the film's own box-office performance. The film's continued popularity through regular television broadcasts, sing-along theatrical re-releases, and a long-running stage touring production has made Grease one of the most continuously culturally present movie musicals of its era, decades after its original 1978 release.

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• La La Land

  La La Land, released in 2016 and directed by Damien Chazelle, revived the classic Hollywood movie musical format for a contemporary audience, telling an original, non-adapted love story between an aspiring actress and a jazz musician set against modern Los Angeles. The film's extended single-take opening number, filmed on a closed Los Angeles freeway on-ramp, required extensive rehearsal with a large ensemble cast of dancers and represented one of the most technically ambitious dance sequences filmed for a mainstream studio movie in decades. La La Land's 2017 Academy Awards ceremony became infamous for a major presentation error, in which the film was mistakenly announced as the Best Picture winner before producers realized the award actually belonged to Moonlight, a mix-up that unfolded live on stage and became one of the most widely discussed moments in Oscars broadcast history. The film's combination of an original, non-adapted musical narrative with genuine homage to classic Hollywood musical filmmaking techniques helped revive mainstream interest in the movie musical format, which had become a considerably less common major studio genre in the decades before its release.

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• Cabaret

  Cabaret, released in 1972 and directed by Bob Fosse, set its musical numbers almost entirely within the walls of a sleazy Berlin nightclub during the final years of the Weimar Republic, using that contained setting as a metaphor for Germany's broader social decay in the years just before the Nazi Party's rise to power. Fosse's distinctive choreographic style — sharp, angular movements, deliberately restrained and controlled rather than expansively theatrical — gave the film's musical numbers a stylized, sometimes unsettling quality that matched the story's darker political undertones, distinguishing it sharply from more conventionally upbeat movie musicals of the era. Liza Minnelli's performance as cabaret singer Sally Bowles won her the Academy Award for Best Actress, and Joel Grey's performance as the club's unsettling Master of Ceremonies won Best Supporting Actor, giving the film two major acting wins in a genre that has historically received relatively few top acting award recognitions. The film's decision to confine nearly all of its musical numbers to justified, in-story diegetic performances within the cabaret itself, rather than characters spontaneously breaking into song throughout the broader narrative, represented a structural departure from typical movie musical conventions that influenced how subsequent "integrated" musicals approached blending song and story.

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More in Film & TV

• Hidden Figures

  "Hidden Figures" (2016), directed by Theodore Melfi, dramatizes the true story of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, three Black women mathematicians whose calculations at NASA were critical to the success of the early American space program, based on Margot Lee Shetterly's nonfiction book of the same name. The film brought significant mainstream public attention to the real contributions of Black women "computers" at NASA during the Space Race, a history that had received relatively little prior widespread recognition, and it prompted renewed public interest in and honors for the real Katherine Johnson, who was still alive at the time of the film's release. Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe's central performances drew significant critical acclaim, and the film became a notable box office success, outperforming many contemporary awards-season dramas and demonstrating a substantial mainstream audience for historical stories centered on Black women. Hidden Figures's combination of its overdue mainstream spotlight on real, previously under-recognized NASA scientists and its strong central performances has made it one of the most culturally significant true-story films of its decade.

• 12 Years a Slave

  "12 Years a Slave" (2013), directed by Steve McQueen, dramatizes the true story of Solomon Northup, a free Black man from New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the antebellum South, based on Northup's own 1853 memoir of the same name. Chiwetel Ejiofor's lead performance and Lupita Nyong'o's supporting performance, in her film debut, both drew significant critical acclaim, with Nyong'o winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and the film itself won the Academy Award for Best Picture. McQueen's unflinching, sustained visual approach to depicting the brutality of slavery, including several extended, unbroken takes of violence that the camera refuses to look away from, was widely credited with giving American slavery a more direct and confrontational cinematic treatment than most previous major studio films had attempted. 12 Years a Slave's combination of its direct grounding in Solomon Northup's own historical memoir and Steve McQueen's unflinching directorial approach has made it one of the most acclaimed and historically significant true-story films ever produced.

• Catch Me If You Can

  "Catch Me If You Can" (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, dramatizes the real early life of Frank Abagnale Jr., who successfully impersonated an airline pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer while forging millions of dollars in checks before being caught by an FBI agent, played by Tom Hanks. The film was based on Abagnale's own memoir, and the real Abagnale, who later became a longtime security consultant working with the FBI, served as a consultant on the production, giving the filmmakers direct access to the actual details and methods behind his real-life cons. The film's stylish, buoyant tone and 1960s period production design, paired with John Williams's jazz-inflected score, gave the true story a lighter, more playful cinematic register than many other crime-based true stories, emphasizing the audacious cleverness of Abagnale's real schemes over their consequences. Catch Me If You Can's combination of its direct access to the real Frank Abagnale's own account and its stylish period filmmaking has made it one of the most purely entertaining true-story films ever produced.

• Erin Brockovich

  "Erin Brockovich" (2000), directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Julia Roberts, dramatizes the true story of the real Erin Brockovich, an unemployed single mother who, working as a legal clerk, helped build a massive lawsuit against Pacific Gas & Electric over water contamination in Hinkley, California. Roberts's performance won her the Academy Award for Best Actress, and her portrayal of the real Brockovich's brash, persistent determination in the face of both corporate stonewalling and professional condescension became one of the most acclaimed performances of her career. The real underlying case resulted in a $333 million settlement, at the time the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit in U.S. history, and the real Erin Brockovich served as a consultant on the film and appeared in a small cameo role. Erin Brockovich's combination of Julia Roberts's Oscar-winning lead performance and its grounding in one of the largest environmental settlements in American legal history has made it one of the most acclaimed true-story legal dramas ever produced.

• The Social Network

  "The Social Network" (2010), directed by David Fincher from Aaron Sorkin's screenplay, dramatizes the founding of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University and the subsequent legal disputes with his co-founders and the Winklevoss twins over credit and ownership of the company. Sorkin's screenplay, built around competing depositions and conflicting accounts of the same events, embraced the genuine ambiguity of the real underlying legal disputes rather than presenting a single definitive version of what happened, a structural choice widely praised by critics as an unusually sophisticated approach to dramatizing contested recent history. Jesse Eisenberg's performance as a fictionalized version of Zuckerberg drew significant critical acclaim, and the film's release while the real Facebook was still a relatively young and rapidly growing company gave it an unusually immediate, real-time quality rare for a historical biopic. The Social Network's combination of its sophisticated multi-perspective legal-dispute structure and its unusually immediate proximity to still-unfolding real events has made it one of the most critically acclaimed true-story films of the 21st century.