Entertainment
10 Forgotten Musical Movies That Deserve To Be Called Masterpieces
Musicals get judged unfairly. And that’s mainly because my personal experience sometimes perceives the songs like interruptions. But one close look at the finest musicals out there and you understand that the finest ones use music as the place where characters finally say the thing they were too scared, too proud, too broken, or too young to say plainly.
The ten films below deserve a bigger spotlight because each one understands that musical numbers can carry loneliness, desire, grief, rebellion, absurdity, identity, and pure cinematic joy. Some are strange. Some are messy. Some are tiny compared to the obvious classics. All ten have that rare feeling where the music seems to unlock the movie’s soul. Go figure.
‘God Help the Girl’ (2014)
God Help the Girl follows Eve (Emily Browning), a fragile and imaginative young woman in Glasgow, as she leaves treatment for mental health struggles and starts making music with James (Olly Alexander) and Cassie (Hannah Murray). The plot is small on purpose. A band forms, feelings shift, friends wander through cafés, parks, bedrooms, and practice spaces, and every song feels like someone trying to build a version of themselves they can survive inside.
That is the charm people underrate. The movie has the softness of an old indie-pop record, but Eve’s pain keeps the sweetness from floating away. Browning makes her feel dreamy without turning her into a cute sadness object. James has his own awkward sincerity, while Cassie gives the group a brighter, sharper pulse. The songs sound light, yet they keep brushing against recovery, loneliness, romance, and the strange relief of finding people who understand your rhythm before your life is fixed.
‘The Lure’ (2015)
A Polish mermaid horror musical set in a nightclub should sound too strange to be this emotionally sharp. The Lure follows two siren sisters, Golden (Michalina Olszańska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek), who are pulled into the human world of 1980s Warsaw nightlife, where they sing, seduce, perform, and try to understand desire inside a place that wants to sell their bodies as spectacle. One sister leans toward hunger and instinct. The other starts chasing love with a human man who has no idea what that love will cost her.
The movie is wild, bloody, glittery, and weirdly heartbreaking in the same breath. The music has that cold synth-pop nightclub pulse, and the performances make the sisters feel magical without smoothing over how dangerous they are. Their tails are gorgeous and grotesque. Their voices are hypnotic. Their bond is the real emotional anchor, especially as romance starts threatening the thing that made them powerful together. The Lure deserves masterpiece status because it turns a fairy tale into body horror, pop fantasy, sister tragedy, and coming-of-age nightmare all at once.
‘Anna and the Apocalypse’ (2017)
Anna and the Apocalypse follows Anna (Ella Hunt), a teenager in the small Scottish town of Little Haven, desperate to leave home and travel before adulthood locks her into everyone else’s expectations. Then Christmas season gets swallowed by a zombie outbreak, and her school, friends, crushes, teachers, and family problems all become part of a survival story with songs. Zombie musicals should collapse from the concept alone, so the shock here is how much heart this one has.
The fun is obvious at first: candy-colored holiday chaos, undead attacks, school corridors, weapons made from whatever is nearby, and songs that treat teen frustration like it deserves a full chorus. Then the movie starts cutting deeper. Anna’s need to escape her dad, John’s (Malcolm Cumming) quiet love for her, Steph’s (Sarah Swire) isolation, and the group’s messy loyalty make the horror hurt more than expected. “Hollywood Ending” gives the whole thing a bright teen-movie lift before the world gets uglier. The movie earns affection because it lets the singing be funny, sincere, and painful without apologizing for any of it.
‘Everyone Says I Love You’ (1996)
Next up, this whole film feels like a wealthy, neurotic family daydreaming its way through romance, and honestly, that is the best way to meet it. Woody Allen’s ensemble musical Everyone Says I Love You follows tangled relationships across New York, Paris, and Venice, with family members, lovers, exes, and romantic disasters slipping into classic American standards. The singing is often imperfect, which gives the movie a loose, personal quality most polished musicals would have cleaned away.
That looseness becomes the point. These people are not bursting into song because they are grand performers. They sing because love has made them foolish, hopeful, jealous, sentimental, or ridiculous. The film has a breezy charm in the way it drifts through crushes, breakups, political mismatches, and impossible romantic fantasies. Goldie Hawn floating by the Seine is the image everyone remembers, and for good reason. It feels like a private wish made visible. The movie is underrated because its lightness hides real craft. It understands romance as performance, embarrassment, and fantasy we keep choosing even after experience should have made us wiser.
‘Pennies from Heaven’ (1981)
Pennies from Heaven stars Arthur Parker (Steve Martin), a sheet-music salesman during the Depression who dreams in old songs because reality gives him very little worth singing about. This is the kind of musical that smiles with its mouth and bleeds underneath. His marriage is cold, his business life is humiliating, and his affair with schoolteacher Eileen (Bernadette Peters) pulls both of them into a fantasy of glamour that their actual world refuses to support.
The lip-synced musical numbers are brilliant. They make happiness feel borrowed. Characters open their mouths and old recordings pour out, as if they can only access beauty through songs that existed before their pain. The “Pennies from Heaven” and “Let’s Misbehave” sequences glow with artificial joy, but the streets outside stay cruel, poor, and unforgiving. Peters gives Eileen a sadness that keeps deepening as her dream turns into compromise. The movie is too bitter to become a comfort musical, which may explain why it still feels under-loved. It uses fantasy to show how badly people need fantasy when life has cornered them.
‘The Commitments’ (1991)
You can feel the sweat in this one before the band even becomes good. The Commitments follows Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins), a working-class Dubliner who pulls together a group of local musicians under the wildly ambitious belief that soul music belongs to them too. They are young, broke, mouthy, restless, and convinced for at least five minutes at a time that they might become legendary. That delusion is part of the magic.
The performances have a rough, electric joy that makes the movie endlessly rewatchable. Deco Cuffe (Andrew Strong)’s voice is ridiculous in the best way, even when his ego makes him impossible to stand. The backing singers bring heat, humor, and actual personality instead of becoming decoration. Joey “The Lips” Fagan (Johnny Murphy) gives the whole project a strange mythic confidence, like every tiny gig is connected to a larger musical universe. The rehearsals, arguments, cramped stages, and explosive versions of “Try a Little Tenderness” and “Mustang Sally” are so godo and make the movie feel alive from the floor up. It is a masterpiece about a band that burns bright partly because it was never built to last.
‘Sing Street’ (2016)
Sing Street follows Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a Dublin schoolboy in the 1980s dealing with his parents’ collapsing marriage, money problems, and a grim new school run by cruel authority. Then he sees Raphina (Lucy Boynton), claims he is in a band to impress her, and suddenly has to invent one with other boys who also need somewhere to put their hunger for escape. Few movies understand how music lets teenagers become brave before they actually feel brave.
The joy is in watching influence turn into identity. Duran Duran, The Cure, Spandau Ballet, and music-video fantasy all pass through Conor until the songs start sounding like his own life fighting back. “Drive It Like You Stole It” is pure teenage imagination taking over a miserable school hall. “Up” captures that first rush of thinking someone sees the version of you that nobody at home understands. Brendan (Jack Reynor), Conor’s older brother, gives the film its bruised wisdom because he knows what it costs to stay stuck. The movie feels small, then suddenly enormous, because a song can become the first door out.
‘Once’ (2007)
Some movie romances shout. This one barely raises its voice, and that is why it hurts so beautifully. Once follows a Dublin busker, Guy (Glen Hansard), and a Czech immigrant, Girl (Markéta Irglová), who meet through music, then begin recording songs together while carrying unfinished lives in different directions. He is still wounded by an old love. She has responsibilities, a child, and a marriage that complicates every feeling the music starts bringing to the surface.
The songs feel discovered rather than staged. “Falling Slowly” has become the obvious signature, but the whole movie has that fragile, lived-in quality where a melody can say what a conversation would ruin. Hansard and Irglová give the relationship a tenderness that never needs cheap romantic certainty. The music shop scene, the late-night piano, the studio sessions, the headphones, the small looks after each song, all of it builds a connection that feels real enough to leave unfinished. That is why Once keeps finding people. It understands that some relationships change your life without becoming your life.
‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch’ (2001)
This musical does not ask for attention. Hedwig and the Angry Inch follows Hedwig (John Cameron Mitchell), an East German rock singer touring seafood restaurants and small venues while telling the story of her botched gender-affirming surgery, her escape from Berlin, and the lover who stole her songs and became famous. The stage becomes her confession booth, battlefield, and survival mechanism at the same time. It kicks the door open in heels, eyeliner, rage, glitter, and heartbreak.
The music is furious, funny, wounded, and alive in a way most screen musicals never dare to be. “Tear Me Down,” for instance, turns identity into a wall being smashed. “Wig in a Box” turns self-creation into an anthem for anyone who has ever had to invent armor before leaving the room. “Origin of Love” gives Hedwig’s longing a mythic shape, while Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt) keeps representing the validation she wants and the theft she cannot forgive. The film is messy in the way a real open wound is messy. Its masterpiece status comes from how completely the songs, performance, pain, jokes, and gendered self-mythology fuse into one unforgettable voice.
‘The Young Girls of Rochefort’ (1967)
Image via Madeleine Films
At #1, we have this pure joy that is harder to make than people admit, and this movie makes it look like the whole city woke up singing in color. The Young Girls of Rochefort follows Delphine (Catherine Deneuve) and Solange (Françoise Dorléac), twin sisters in Rochefort who dream of love, art, music, and a larger life beyond their seaside town. Around them, sailors, shopkeepers, old lovers, visiting performers, and strangers keep crossing paths as if romance has turned the streets into choreography.
The miracle is how much melancholy lives inside all that brightness. Deneuve and Dorléac give the sisters lightness, but the film never treats longing as shallow. People miss each other by seconds. Old love hovers near new possibility. Michel Legrand’s music turns every walk, glance, and turn through the square into emotional movement. Gene Kelly brings Hollywood grace into Demy’s French dream world without making it feel imported. The colors are famous, the dancing is gorgeous, and the songs are addictive, but the reason it sits at No. 1 is deeper than style. It captures the feeling that life may be full of near-misses, yet beauty keeps asking people to step back into the street.
The Young Girls of Rochefort
- Release Date
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April 11, 1968
- Runtime
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126 Minutes
- Director
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Jacques Demy
- Writers
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Jacques Demy
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Catherine Deneuve
Delphine Garnier
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Françoise Dorléac
Solange Garnier
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