This is a bona fide pre-Code musical, so the talkie scenes burst with prohibition-busting backstage antics and a little Park Avenue farce, but the curtains open wide on four of the most outlandish numbers ever filmed, courtesy the kaleidoscopic visions of Busby Berkeley and what deadpan Ned Sparks calls: “The gay side, the hard-boiled side, the cynical and funny side of the Depression!” Vivacious economic optimism in We’re in the Money and heartbreaking social commentary for the postwar generation in My Forgotten Man (blues vocals by Etta Moten) bookend the film.

So much has been written about Singin’ in the Rain that it’s easy to forget that it’s not just about the birth of the talkies.

It’s about the birth of music on screen, the birth of the movie musical.

Don’s pal Cosmo, wonderfully played by Donald O’Connor, gets a job as musical director and the cliches are true: the whole picture erupts with joy, and with wonderful songs like All I Do Is Dream Of You, Moses Supposes, Make ’Em Laugh and of course the indomitably romantic Singin’ in the Rain itself.

A critical and commercial flop upon its release, it’s since become a cult classic, with standout numbers like the 80s-rock-tinged Cool Rider and the infectious, none-too-subtle Score Tonight (set in – what else? – a bowling alley) living rent free in my head for decades.

It’s remarkable a film as luxy as My Fair Lady – in 1964 the most expensive movie ever made – feels so weirdly authentic.

That’s why the final scene feels like a rescue, not a coffin closing.

It’s all far too horny to be branded the thinking person’s musical, but Fosse masterfully splits the difference between the two.

The film is brimming with soulful ditties like Keith Carradine’s I’m Easy and Ronee Blakely’s My Idaho Home.

The 24 characters on its principal ensemble cast are like musical notes that complement and compete with each other.

My strong feelings for High School Musical, a groundbreaking cable TV event if not technically stellar movie (the lip syncing? It’s off), owe mostly to timing: I was 12 years old when it premiered in January 2006, the prime age to fall hard for its classic fitting in v being yourself stakes and even harder for Zac Efron’s hair swoop.

Watching HSM in its wave felt gravitational, enjoyably ridiculous; the first movie was earnest without being too sentimental, your unhinged scream at a rollercoaster drop turned into the ethos of a whole franchise (whose endearment is evergreen – see: the very Gen Z meta HSM: The Musical: The Series starring one Olivia Rodrigo).

There are so many alluring entry-points into Mel Stuart’s glorious adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – a deranged Gene Wilder going for broke, endlessly appealing, if disgustingly unhygienic, scenes of sweet things, a plot structure that resembles a chillingly casual slasher movie but for annoying children – that it’s easy to imagine it working without also being a musical (it was after all a captivating novel without telegraphed song breaks).

Dahl obviously hated the end product (he had a similar distaste for Nicolas Roeg’s equally thrillingly perverse take on The Witches) but it remains a wildly engaging and trippy adventure that manages, quite deftly, to combine awful kids enduring cruel and unusual, if arguably deserved, “deaths” (theories have since populated that compare Wonka to a deranged and inventive moralistic killer a la Jigsaw) with lively yet sparsely scattered musical numbers.

Rarely has the title song from a musical eclipsed its source quite as cruelly as New York, New York.

The film, directed by Martin Scorsese on the back of his Taxi Driver success, was a costly, grudgingly reviewed flop; the song, composed by Cabaret geniuses Kander and Ebb, worked its way swiftly into the American canon, made universally recognizable via Liza Minnelli’s original interpretation and Frank Sinatra’s subsequent cover

In 1977, audiences and critics weren’t sure what to make of a musical that married iridescent 1940s showmanship with ugly post-Cassavetes relationship drama, exquisitely acted by Minnelli and Robert De Niro as a warring musician couple who were never meant to be