100 Best Musical Movies of All Time

Holiday Inn turns 80, and Hairspray celebrates its 15th anniversary this year!

If you’ve got a song in your heart, we’ve got a list for your eyes: The best-reviewed musicals from Wizard of Oz to La La Land! With Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights finally making the leap from Broadway to screen, we’ve put together 100 showstoppers that’s all-singing, all-dancing!

Every expression of the musical movie is present in this cavalcade of the 100 best-reviewed: the classics (All That Jazz, The Sound of Music), the mostly moderns (La La Land, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, Mary Poppins Returns), the MGMs (Singin’ in the Rain, An American in Paris), the Astaire & Rogers (Top Hat, Swing Time), intimate indies (Once, Dancer in the Dark), and stuff for the kids (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang). We kept this countdown to live-action musicals, so nothing animated except for the partially so, like Mary Poppins.

And we picked movies where people break into song and dance, not ones where they just perform music; in other words, Crazy Heart, Bohemian Rhapsody, and the 2018 A Star Is Born don’t work for this list, but the Judy Garland A Star Is Born does. Recently, we’ve added Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, tick, tick…BOOM!, which netted an Andrew Garfield Best Actor Oscar nomination, and Cryano, starring Peter Dinklage. Then, we sorted all the movies by Tomatometer, with Certified Fresh films first.

And now it’s time for the big showstopper: The 100 Best Musical Movies of All Time! —Alex Vo