Diegetic or non-diegetic music, original music or not, anything goes here. Most of these are feature-length movies that are not Musicals, but some are, and there's at least one short cartoon here. Music is included here not just because of what it adds to the plot - sometimes the music is just a song I'd never heard or forgot about that I heard in a movie.
- Jojo Rabbit (2019)
In this film set in Nazi Germany, the dialog is in English, but all of the writing we see in the movie is in German. We also hear two songs that were hits in their original English-language versions, that are used in the film in their German versions - The Beatles "Komm, gib mir deine Hand" (I Want to Hold Your Hand) and David Bowie's "Helden" (Heroes.)
- The Long Goodbye (1973)
John Williams and Johnny Mercer wrote a theme song for this movie, also named "The Long Goodbye." We hear the theme played throughout the movie in several different styles, instrumentals or with vocals, played by 7 different artists, according to the credits. We hear a male vocal version at the beginning of the movie that changes on the beat to a muzak version when Philip Marlowe walks into a grocery store. We hear a jazz trio version, a female vocal version, and we hear a Mexican guitars-styled instrumental version at the Tijuana border. When Marlowe's next door neighbors are on their front porch in the nude we hear a crazy instrumental sitar version of the theme. We hear a piano player in a bar attempting to learn the song, and we hear it when a gangster's girlfriend turns on a car radio. We also hear a band playing it at a funeral in Mexico, and we even hear four notes of the theme play when Marlowe presses a doorbell.
- The Cousins (1959)
At the very end of this French art movie by director Claude Chabrol, we hear a loud and very dramatic instrumental theme from a Wagner Opera (The Tristan und Isolde Prelude, I think) as we watch a man who just accidentally shot his cousin to death, stumble around his home in shock, not knowing what to do next. He sits down in a chair, still holding the gun, when the door buzzer sounds. He gets up to answer the door, walking to the left, as the camera tracks to the right over to an automatic turntable playing the music on a record. (We heard the theme playing on the turntable earlier in the movie, but we did not know that a record was playing it this time.) The music ends, the needle moves to the end of the record, and the tonearm lifts up and returns to its cradle as we see the word "fin" and the movie ends. It's a great use of diegetic music to end the soundtrack and the movie.
- The Dead Don't Die (2019)
This zombie movie only uses one song, "The Dead Don't Die" sung by Sturgill Simpson. It plays in the opening, and on car radios. We see CDs of it for sale in stores, a character buys one, then we hear it played on a car CD player. Bill Murray's character asks what the song is when he hears it on the radio of his police car, and in a meta moment, Adam Driver's character tells him it's the Theme Song (to the movie they are acting in that we are watching.)
- Elizabethtown (2005)
This is probably the best use of the song "Free Bird" in a movie, even though it is interrupted by a long conversation.
A small town band reunites after many years to play the overplayed Lynnyrd Skynnrd anthem "Free Bird" at the end of a memorial service in Kentucky. When they hear it, the crowd goes wild. The drummer signals to a stagehand to release a very large bird made of white paper to make it fly out on a wire but when the bird is freed it catches on fire on the lights above it and the flaming bird sets fire to the hall as it swings over the audience. The bird then crashes into the auditorium, the fire sprinklers go off, and everybody is forced to evacuate the room, but the band keeps playing, soaking wet, like the band on the Titanic, because the band is feeling it and it's a long song.
- Hardcore Henry (2015)
Near the end of the movie in a climactic fight scene when Henry is fighting an army of cyborg super soldiers, he is slowing down. We hear Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" begin as Henry stabs a syringe full of adrenaline into each of his legs. The song gets going and Henry uses his new energy and it's the perfect song to accompany the intensely brutal and bloody fighting that we see. When the song gets to the lyrics "I don't want to stop at all" the music stops and Henry is forced to stop fighting by a man with the superpower to immobilize him.
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
During the end credits we hear some overbearing dramatic music playing there is nothing left but pounding drums. When the drums end we hear the quiet music from Davy Jones' music box which we heard earlier in the movie. This music then gradually slows as if the wound up music box is winding down until it ends just as the credits end. This is trivial and barely noticeable since it happens at a part of the film when hardly anybody is left in the theater, but I like it better for that. Sometimes it's worth waiting until the end of fifteen minutes of personal assistants, hairdressers, caterers, honeywagon drivers and computer effects operator credits.
- Song of the Sea (2014)
The supernatural is freed from the natural world with a song. The Selkie melody and how it is woven throughout the story until we finally hear the Selkie song at the climax, is the heart of the movie, which could not exist without it.
- Red Cliff (2008)
The meeting between two of the movie's main characters, occurs with few words, and a great musical moment. Zhuge Liang, advisor to a king, sets out to try to form a military alliance with another king, by convincing the king's viceroy, Zhou Yu, that it will benefit both kingdoms. On his way to meet Zhou Yu, Zhuge Liang watches him leading hundreds of men training for war, but soon the generals make all the soldiers stop fighting when they hear a flute playing in the distance, occasionally out of tune. The leaders and the soldiers all look around for the flute player until Zhou Yu discovers a young boy playing the flute on a hill above the soldiers, with a buffalo herder. Zhou Yu demands the flute from the boy, then grabs the herder's knife. At this point, we don't know anything about Zhou Yu. He looks angry and we think he might destroy the flute with the knife, or maybe even kill the boy, but instead, he uses the knife to enlarge some of the holes on the flute to make it play in tune. He gives it back to the boy, who then plays in perfect tune. The soldiers all wait until he finishes the piece. This scene is a way for Zhuge Liang to understand Zhou Yu and his men's characters in the gracious way that he treats the peasant boy and in how the soldiers can fight and also appreciate music. The two men develop a great friendship and partnership.
Shortly afterwards in another nice musical moment, before making the alliance, the two men learn whether they can work well together by playing a duet on stringed instruments. Their playing shows they work together well and the alliance is made.
- Back to the Future (1985)
17-year-old Marty McFly plays guitar in a rock band in 1985. He travels back in time to 1955 where he fills in on guitar in a pre-rock-n-roll band of black musicians. After one song, the injured guitarist and singer asks him to play something that really cooks, so McFly tells the crowd he's going to play an oldie from where he's from, and starts playing and singing Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode." The guitarist, Marvin Berry, goes backstage to call his cousin Chuck and tells him "You know that new sound you're looking for? Well listen to this" and holds the phone up to the stage so he can hear the song. It's a perfect joke for this time-travel comedy. It looks like a bad case of cultural appropriation, showing a white teenager inventing Chuck Berry's style, until you realize that McFly is only playing what Berry had already created - in a different time line. McFly goes wild at the end of the song, playing his guitar in the style of future rockers including Pete Townsend, Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix. The audience stops dancing and stands dumbfounded at the strange noise. McFly tells them they're not ready for it yet, but their kids are gonna love it.
(When Chuck Berry wrote the song in 1955 he took the opening guitar line note for note from a 1946 Louis Jordan song. I doubt that the audience is supposed to know about the plagiarism, but those who do are treated to another unplanned dimension to the joke.)
- Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
In a film with almost no music, when women at night around a bonfire suddenly begin singing the beautiful and dramatic chant-like choral piece "The Young Girl on Fire" it feels like it comes from a place of myth. The Latin lyrics about not being able to escape echo the repeated allusions to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, who could not escape Hell and be with her lover, just as the women in a forbidden relationship can't be with each other. The song ends as one of the protagonists' long dress catches on fire. The piece is then repeated in the end credits after the final cut of the woman on fire's face in tears at an orchestra concert.
- Black Orpheus (1959)
In a film full of good music the best is at the very end. Two young boys believe that Orpheus makes the sun come up in the morning when he plays his guitar. After he dies, one of the boys plays Orpheus' guitar and when the sun comes up they think that now they have the power to make it rise. A young girl joins them and tells the boy that now he is Orpheus, and asks him to play a song for her. He plays the wonderful upbeat song "Samba de Orfeu" as they all dance until the film ends.
- The Producers (1967)
The opening song "Springtime for Hitler" with singing and tap-dancing Nazis, showgirls with giant hats, a chorus line of women storm troopers in hot pants, and a Busby-Berkeleyesque overhead dancing swastika, is a perfect example of the shocking bad taste that was supposed to insure that the stage musical would be a terrible failure. (Even though it became a satirical hit instead.)
- Hangover Square (1945)
Composer and murderer George Harvey Bone has a mental breakdown during the premiere of his piano concerto and literally burns down the house. The orchestra members and audience run for their lives as Bone keeps playing the piano and burns to death. The excellent score is by Bernard Hermann.
- Small Axe (2020)
Episode: Lovers Rock (2020)
This film, part of the Small Axe television mini-series, is a celebration of reggae and dance music at a house party in London in the 1980s. The highlight of all the great music we hear is Janet Kay's 1979 hit "Silly Games." When the DJ's record ends, the dancers continue dancing and singing the song by themselves for several minutes.
- White God (2014)
When Alpha dog Hagen and his army of dogs are about to attack his former caretaker Lili, she pulls her horn out of her back pack and plays a song that calms him down. The whole pack lies down in the street, soothed by her playing.
- The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Lilian Gish runs phony reverend Robert Mitchum off her property to protects the children he's chasing and sits in a rocking chair on her porch with a shotgun. He comes back late at night, sits in her front yard and starts singing the religious song "Leaning." After a while, she joins in. Two adversaries, singing the lyrics with different intentions.
- Cabaret (1972)
Two men are talking at an outdoor cafe in pre WWII Germany when a boy starts singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" in what appears to be an innocent performance, but after the camera pans down and we see he's wearing a Nazi arm band, it becomes an ominous vision of the future, even more so after the crowd, which includes children and more Nazis, slowly stand up and join in singing.
- Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
This brilliant film has a great soundtrack that plays with the concepts of diegetic and non-diegetic music. For the first 32 minutes of the film the only background music we hear is drumming on a drum kit. We hear this solo drumming as Riggan leaves the theater and walks and talks on the street with Mike, but then we see them pass a drummer on the street playing the music we have been hearing. Riggan tosses coins to him as the camera pans to get a shot of the drummer then returns to the two actors.
This joke is repeated again towards the end of the film when we hear drumming as Riggan is walking through a hallway in the theater, then he passes a drummer playing a drum kit.
Later, when Riggan runs nearly-naked through Times Square, we hear drumming then we see a marching drum band.
In another scene, Riggan, about to jump off a roof, says the word "music" and background classical music begins. It stops when a man touches him to stop him from jumping, but it begins again when he jumps off the roof and flies around the city. After he lands he tells someone to stop the music, and the music stops. In his fantasy he is able to control not only his interaction with the physical world but also his own soundtrack.
- Blazing Saddles (1974)
In a great spoof of diegetic vs. non-diegetic soundtrack music, we see the well-dressed sheriff with a Gucci saddlebag sitting on a horse in the middle of a desert. After he starts riding we hear a jazz orchestra in the background playing "April in Paris." But then we see him ride right up to Count Basie playing a white grand piano with his full orchestra in the middle of the desert. The sheriff slaps Basie's hand in greeting then rides away as the song comes to an end.
- Miller's Crossing (1990)
At home in his mansion, a prohibition-era mob boss puts "Danny Boy" sung by Frank Patterson on his phonograph and lies down in bed to smoke a cigar. We hear the song playing as we watch gangsters break into his house and murder his servants. He is alerted to their approach, and a gunfight begins, and all throughout the shooting and frantic action there is no dialogue, just "Danny Boy" playing in the background and the sounds of a few million machine gun bullets before the song comes to an end along with the scene.
- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
At the end of the movie we hear "We'll Meet Again" by Vera Lynn, a song that was popular during World War II and expressed the optimism of returning to a normal existence after the war, ironically sung over images of nuclear bombs destroying the world, after which there can be no return to normal life.
- CODA (2021)
This film uses music in several great ways to convey the experience of deaf people. CODA is an acronym for children of deaf adults and it also means the conclusion to a piece of music. Ruby Rossi is a hearing teenage girl whose mother, father, and brother are all deaf. They don't understand why she enjoys music and wants to go to college to study it, though her father does enjoy playing very loud hip-hop in his truck because he likes how the bass feels. Ruby loves to sing, so she takes a high school choir class where she is assigned to sing "You're All I Need To Get By," a Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell duet, with a boy named Miles who she's attracted to. After watching the two awkwardly rehearse the song a few times during the school year we eventually see them perform it at a school concert. First we see Ruby singing onstage with the choir while her parents sit in the audience unable to appreciate her performance. Then Ruby and Miles start to sing the duet and we expect to see a great performance, but suddenly the music fades out and the film becomes silent. We watch the performance from her family's perspective with no sound for almost a minute, as they look around to observe the audience's reaction.
After the show Ruby's father asks her what the song was about, then asks her to sing it while he holds her neck to feel her voice so he can understand her passion for singing. This convinces him that she is a good singer and he takes her to an audition for a prestigious music college.
Ruby's family is not allowed to watch her audition, but they sneak into the balcony anyway. She starts to sing Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" but the judges are not impressed. Then she starts using her hands to communicate the lyrics to the song in sign language so her family can also experience her performance. Doing this improves her singing and impresses the judges enough to earn her admission to the school.
- Saltburn (2023)
There's a lot of good music in this film but the best is at the very end when we hear "Murder on the Dancefloor" a great forgotten 2001 new disco dance track by Sophie Ellis-Bextor as middle-class college student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) dances naked through his new Saltburn mansion after murdering his way into the British upper class. After he stops dancing to admire a shrine to the aristocrats he killed, the music stops and the screen cuts to black, then the song plays again over the end credits. It's also used in the trailers. Exposed to a new audience by the film, the song became more popular and charted higher than when it was originally released more than 20 years before.
- Barbie (2023)
There are a lot of good songs in this film but my favorite, which earned Grammy and Oscar nominations, is "What Was I Made For?" by Billie Eilish, which appears at the end of the movie. I was not persuaded to watch this film until I heard this song, which convinced me that the film was more profound than I had thought a movie about a doll marketed to young girls would be. A similar case can be made for another song in the movie - "I'm Just Ken" sung by Ryan Gosling which also received an Oscar nomination.
- No Hard Feelings (2023)
Hall & Oates' song "Maneater" is used in several good ways in this raunchy romantic comedy, first as a diegetic sound, then as non-diegetic background music, then performed live by one of the characters.
Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) and his date Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence), who was hired by his parents to make him a man before he goes to college, are sitting in a bar when "Maneater" plays over the speakers. Percy tells her that he used to have nightmares about the song because it's about a monster who only comes out at night with the lyrics "watch out boy, she'll chew you up." Madie tells him that's not what the song is about.
In the next scene they leave the bar and go skinny dipping at night in the ocean. After a group of young people steal their clothes, naked Maddy chases after and savagely punches and wrestles with them to get the clothes back as we hear "Maneater" played loudly in the background. Maddie seems to illustrate Percy's version of the song here.
Later when they go to a fancy restaurant on a fake prom date, Maddie blackmails Percy into playing something on the piano during the pianist's break, so he plays and sings a slower and less upbeat version of "Maneater" to a big round of applause. We did not expect him to sing so well and neither did she. When she expresses her surprise, he tells her that he went home and learned the song after they talked about it in the bar.