Welcome to 5 Favorites. Each week, I will put together a list of my 5 favorites (films, performances, whatever strikes my fancy) along with commentary on a given topic each week, usually in relation to a specific film releasing that week.

In recent years, biopics of music royalty have been all the craze. Films about Elton John, Freddie Mercury, and myriad others have been made in large numbers in the last few years. This weekend, another such film releases as Baz Luhrmann takes a look at the life story of Elvis Presley. While I haven’t seen nearly enough of the best biopics to make this list, I could really only list Amadeus and La Vie en Rose without scraping the bottom of the barrel. That said, I can expand the list to movies about music and easily create a list. Matter of fact, my list ended up being twice the size that I should have. As such, I took out some musicals: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Pink Floyd – The Wall, Dreamgirls, and the aforementioned La Vie en Rose. That left me with only six films. The one that lost out happens to be a film I covered recently, Victor/Victoria. Like Torch Song Trilogy, another film I considered, that film is less about music as a subject and more about music as a setting. The same could be true of Cabaret, which failed to make the list on the musical basis.

Five titles remain and those titles are below, three are biopics and two are biopic-adjacent, but are not films about real people, though they take place in and are about music in a broader sense. One of them is still classified as a musical, but considering it’s a musical biopic about music, I decided to include it even though I didn’t include the less “musical” La Vie en Rose. What’s also surprising is that this is my first list since the original few where I haven’t covered any of the five films previously.

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