The Choice is Yours: Community Vote
Poll closes 11 November 2025 so click to vote
After hours of wrangling, singing and checking up on licenses, we’ve selected five stomping musicals for you to choose for our next community film on 22 November 2025. All are top rated, making it hard to choose, so we’ve curated some of those critics’ reviews to help.
Let’s start with that other Singin’ in the Rain
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (PG, 1hr 32min)
Dilys Powell, Sunday Times (UK): “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is something rare nowadays: a film that gives the impression of having been made with joy.”
Michael J. Casey, Boulder Weekly: “It has one of the best endings in all of cinema - if it doesn't break your heart, nothing will.”
Chris Breyer, Los Angeles Free Press: “What makes Les Parapluies a delight is its almost total involvement with the cinematic medium; its delight in colour, movement and gesture; the making of fantasy out of the most common objects of modern existence.”
Well, it makes sense to us
Stop Making Sense (PG, 1hr 28min)
Yago García, Cinemanía: “The film may not be the best filmed concert in history, not even Talking Heads’ best (only two songs from Remain in Light, bastards?), but it does remain a feast of sound and movement that rises above its time and its pretensions to stimulate not only the fans of the group and those of its epigones (Vampire Weekend and LCD Soundsystem, among others), but anyone with ears and muscles.”
Roger Ebert, Rogerebert.com: “The overwhelming impression throughout “Stop Making Sense” is of enormous energy, of life being lived at a joyous high…..But the film’s peak moments come through Byrne’s simple physical presence. He jogs in place with his sidemen; he runs around the stage; he seems so happy to be alive and making music.”
Life is a cabaret, old chum
Cabaret (PG, 2h 4mins)
Guy Lodge, Film of the Week: “It’s hard to believe it’s half a century since Cabaret first sashayed into cinemas: in look, sound and sensibility, it still feels fresh and daring, expanding the possibilities of what musicals can do and say at every turn.”
Orrin Konheim, Washington City Paper: “Whereas musicals have traditionally aimed to uplift and elate with song, Cabaret aims to provoke and comment on a darker time.”
Mike McGranaghan, Aisle Seat: “Cabaret is in some respects a typical feel-good musical, yet it’s also so much deeper than that.”
Rob Vaux, Cinema-stache: “The Nazi musical, as star Liza Minnelli glibly put it, has felt pertinent for a long time.”
Something saucy from Down Under
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (15, 1hr 42min)
David Parkinson, Radio Times: “Tremendous fun, with a deliciously sugar-coated message, this is the closest the cinema has come to a proper musical in years.”
“The core of Stephen Elliott’s movie about three drag queens on a no-hope road trip from Sydney to Alice Springs is a warm-hearted tale about yearning for family.”
Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: “I wasn't prepared for the generosity and gorgeousness with which Aussie writer-director Stephan Elliott turns this most unlikely road picture into something arresting - if a tad sentimental - in its naive vision of a perfectly tolerant world.”
Raindrops are falling and love is in the air
Singin’ In the Rain (U, 1hr 42min)
Peter Bradshaw, Guardian: “The unstoppable joy of the musical numbers, especially with O’Connor, is what never fails to seduce – perhaps especially in Moses Supposes. A pompous schoolteacherly fellow tries to instruct Don how enunciate his vowels and consonants; Cosmo shows up, and soon they have disrupted the entire thing with an anarchic dance number. The prissy business of correct elocution couldn’t be less relevant. The songs themselves often float surreally free of the story, or sub-textually provide the joins.”
“...might be the most magical of movies about movies precisely because it doesn’t insist on the magic of movies.”
Sara Michelle, MovieFreak.com:
“To put it bluntly, this is one of the funniest films ever made.”