10 Movies Like ‘La La Land’ To Celebrate Its 10th Anniversary
Has it really been a decade since La La Land (2016) came out? Damien Chazelle’s love letter to the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals was hailed as a masterpiece upon release, embodying a sense of joy and optimism that feels sorely lacking in this day and age. It’s bright and colorful, with Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling having absolutely magnetic chemistry, making La La Land not only a love story, but a story about those who dare to follow their dreams. It’s not always sunshine and rainbows, but even in its more serious moments, there’s a vulnerability and heart that makes it impossible not to have your eyes well up just a little bit.
Many cinephiles may be more familiar with the infamous gaffe where La La Land was accidentally announced as the Best Picture winner that year and had to awkwardly be shuffled offstage for the real winner, Moonlight (2016), but its legacy is more than that. It’s one of the best movie musicals of the 21st century, and it deserves to be celebrated for its own achievements. It’s such a singular movie, and if fans want to find other films that capture a fraction of the magic that La La Land did all those years ago, these ten films, many of which can be streamed on HBO Max and Paramount+, will definitely get the job done.
If you want an optimistic, feel-good musical that will have you singing songs days after the credits roll, The Greatest Showman is your film.
Does it explore the same emotional depths as La La Land? No, but The Greatest Showman instead focuses on using music as a source of empowerment in the face of adversity. Characters sing their hearts out and use music to convey who they truly are, much like Mia and Seb, who use their passion for the arts to define who they are and what they truly want in life. Is it accurate to the real P.T. Barnum’s life? Oh dear lord no, the film is full of so much historical revisionism that it’s basically more fiction than fact. Despite that, thanks to its killer soundtrack, with wonderful tracks like “This Is Me” and “The Greatest Show,” The Greatest Showman is a musical you go for the music more than anything else, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
With people’s tastes in music so eclectic and diverse, it’s rare to see a musical that most people can agree has a stellar score, but leave it to Lin-Manuel Miranda to make the score for In the Heights an absolute bop.
The secret sauce of what makes In the Heights click is its setting. There’s a real lived-in authenticity to Washington Heights that any New Yorker will find instantly familiar, much in the same way La La Land creates a vivid and faithful recreation of LA. Bodegas bustle, the summers feel extra hot and sticky, and the clubs are bursting with people all dancing and having a good time. The film does a remarkable job of translating the musical of the same name into a 143-minute movie, giving songs like “96,000” a sense of scale that simply couldn’t be possible on a Broadway stage. That, and the amount of love for Hispanic culture and the lived-in experiences of the cast’s Hispanic characters, is palpable in every frame of the film. There’s an identity to In the Heights that can’t be replicated, and combined with its use of hip-hop and rap, makes it a musical that truly feels modern.
Both In the Heights and Begin Again share a clear love for the city that never sleeps, but instead of having boisterous, energizing musical numbers, Begin Again focuses more on the moment-to-moment human connection that made Mia and Seb’s relationship in La La Land so impactful.
To be clear, Begin Again isn’t a romance, but a movie about the relationships artists have to create art. Music is a collaborative process, and Begin Again makes it clear that making great art requires genuine effort, a love for what you’re doing, and healthy/respectful boundaries between collaborators. Keira Knightley does a wonderful job singing her heart out, but it's Mark Ruffalo who steals the show, thanks to a handful of sequences that show what goes through his mind whenever he listens to music. While there are great songs littered throughout the film, it's the way that the film shows the platonic working relationship between Ruffalo and Knightley that stands out in a genre that’s all for swooning romances. Begin Again wants to be a musical dramedy that shows the effort it takes to really break into the music industry, something that fans of La La Land will resonate with.
La La Land has inspired plenty of upbeat movie musicals after it, but as far as its own inspirations go, Singin’ in the Rain is THE movie musical.
Singin’ in the Rain is an all-time classic and arguably the greatest movie musical of all time. It documents the fall of silent films and rise of talkies in Hollywood, but what helps make it stand out is just how gosh darn pleasant it is! Everything that La La Land aspired to be, Singin’ in the Rain was. It’s bright, colorful, with magnetic performances, especially Gene Kelly’s performance in the film’s title track. There’s no denying that “City of Stars” took at least a little bit from “Singin’ in the Rain” because imitation, after all, is the greatest form of flattery. There’s just something magical about the execution of Singin’ in the Rain that’s impossible to compare to any other musical, except maybe West Side Story (1961). Cynics may call it corny, but it would be better to call it earnest, a film that wears its heart on its sleeve and stays true to itself.
Speaking of West Side Story, its impact on movie musicals is just as long-lasting as Singin’ in the Rain’s. The story of the Sharks and the Jets has become synonymous with Broadway, and the film adaptation is regarded as one of the greatest films of all time.
There’s such a simplicity to West Side Story that anyone can get behind it. It’s the story of two star-crossed lovers, fighting against the odds, only for reality to end their love in tragedy. It’s all very Shakespearean, intentionally so, but what helps make West Side Story stand the test of time are the songs crafted by Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein. It isn’t really a question of what La La Land took from West Side Story, but what La La Land didn’t take from it. Mia and Seb are lovers from two completely different career paths, or worlds; the songs flip between precision dance numbers and swooning ballads, and it all may not end in tragedy for them, but it’s certainly not an ideal ending that romantics would hope for. West Side Story is the progenitor of the modern movie musical, and it deserves your attention.
It’s pretty clear within the first few minutes of La La Land that there’s a sense of heightened realism in the sunny streets of Los Angeles. That dreamlike state of mind does wonders to elevate the film’s biggest musical numbers, and the same surreal vibes are all over Yesterday.
Like La La Land, Yesterday is a film that loves the process of creating art, even if it’s a little cheeky about it. Yesterday places its lead, an aspiring musician named Jack, in a world where the Beatles never existed, and he begins to pass off their songs as his own. There’s definitely a lot of humor watching celebrities like Ed Sheeran and James Corden gawk in awe at the Beatles songs Jack passes off as his own, but it doesn’t change the fact that Yesterday loves the music of the Fab Four with all its being. There’s also a great overarching romance between Jack and his childhood friend Ellie, who keeps on encouraging him to keep going and never give up on his dreams. Dreams have power in Yesterday, and like La La Land, it reminds audiences of the power that dreams can have on our lives.
Damien Chazelle clearly has a love for the creative arts. Whenever he creates a film about artists or actors devoted to their passions, it's almost always a slam dunk, but even then, there’s nothing quite like Babylon.
The best way to describe Babylon is if you took Singin’ in the Rain and filled it with booze, coke, sex, and elephant dung. And even then, that’s the tame version of that sentence. La La Land is a sanitized and romantic view of fame and art, but Babylon is the polar opposite. It’s a wild rollercoaster of a movie, totalling in at a gargantuan three hours and spanning decades just to tell the debaucherous story of the rise and fall of the Golden Age of Hollywood. The film still contains a lot of Chazelle’s hallmarks though, including huge set pieces with dozens of actors, frenetic editing, and a dialogue-less ending that puts a perfect coda on the film’s madness. It’s gonzo in every definition of the word, and if you wished that La La Land wasn’t so nice and polite, Babylon is here for your depraved and filthy mind.
Yesterday does a great job of conveying the magic that music can have on our lives, but Rocketman takes it to a whole other level. Rocketman may be a biopic, but it genuinely cares about the music of Elton John and turns what would have been a dry look at one of the UK’s greatest musicians into a larger-than-life musical much like La La Land.
Taron Egerton is a perfect Elton John, embodying the flamboyance and vulnerability that comes with the man. When he’s on stage, he’s commanding attention and loving life. When offstage, he’s still charming, even if his demons are much more visible and you can see the path of destruction he’s on. Those moments are made all the better when they’re performed with the same bombast as the best Broadway musical number, complete with complex choreography and Egerton belting notes like he’s trying to win Best Actor at the Oscars. It’s a fantastic musical that has La La Land’s influence all over it, making Elton John not just a performer to admire from a distance but a person with flaws we can relate to.
For all of the fun and energy of La La Land, it never forgets that it's a romance, one that doesn’t exactly have your stereotypical Hollywood ending you would expect from a musical of its type, and the same can be said for A Star Is Born.
There are many incarnations of this film, but the 2018 version in particular captures that same tone that La La Land weaves into its depiction of mixing business with pleasure. Ally, played by Lady Gaga, starts as a waitress aspiring to make it big and falls in love with Bradley Cooper’s Jack, a huge country star with a history of alcoholism. There are definitely parallels to Seb and Mia’s relationship in La La Land, with both couples loving each other despite the pressures placed on them by being artists. While La La Land’s ending is more bittersweet with how Mia and Seb end their relationship, the resolution to A Star is Born is nothing short of heartbreaking, but resonated with audiences in much the same way La La Land’s did.
There’s big and bombastic, and then there’s Moulin Rouge!. Baz Luhrmann is not a director known for subtlety, and Moulin Rouge! is so extravagant and grand that it laughs at words like “nuance.”
From the moment go, Moulin Rouge! assaults the viewer with enough spectacle for 128 minutes that it borders on mania. The editing is frenetic, the close-ups are a bit too close, and the amount of energy on screen is enough to exhaust even the most ardent musical theater lover. But musicals are all about big emotions and big feelings! That’s the entire reason why people burst into song. Simple words can’t express the depths of their emotions. In that regard, Moulin Rouge! is one of the most passionate musicals in existence, with its ode to romanticism and how love can truly conquer all. Moulin Rouge! Is what you get if the cast of La La Land threw logic to the wind and followed their hearts in the truest sense of the word. It definitely isn’t for everyone, but those romantics yearning for love will find it in Moulin Rouge!.
