The two most “spectacular” musical scenes in cinema, according to Christopher Nolan
A musical number in a cinema can be hard to nail. It’s incredibly easy to veer into theatre-kid territory, with a cheesy spoken line of dialogue turning into a sharply sung note, or the random introduction of a backing track that takes the viewer out of the dream-world of cinema, reminding them that the entire creation is a falsity.
And yet, Christopher Nolan has picked the two scenes he believes completely nail the form.
You wouldn’t normally stick “musical” and “Nolan” in the same sentence, would you? The director tends to favour serious, grounded stories – just look at Oppenheimer, his 2023 epic that traced the life, work, and inner turmoil of J Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist often dubbed the “father of the atomic bomb”. He even brought in towering figures like Albert Einstein with a sense of raw, unsettling realism. And let’s be honest, Einstein isn’t exactly going to burst into a rap song, is he?
That’s not to say musicals can’t be gritty or grounded. They don’t all have to follow in the footsteps of La La Land – a film Nolan openly rates – with Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling spinning through neon-lit streets, tap dancing and swaying to a dreamlike rhythm that grows more detached from reality as it goes on. As it happens, one of Nolan’s top picks for a musical moment in film actually came out after that 2016 romantic drama.
Instead, Nolan deemed a certain scene in one of 2025’s most talked-about movies “spectacular”. In conversation with director Ryan Coogler at a special screening for his latest hit, Sinners, Nolan turned his attention toward a specific scene in which the film’s antagonist, Remmick, and his crew of vampires perform the Irish folk song, ‘Rocky Road to Dublin’.
Nolan gushed, “It’s a wonderful film in a lot of ways, but it deals in very stereotypical tropes of Voodoo about what constitutes the darkness of the human soul – how it’s expressed in anthropological terms. When I saw your film, the Irish River Dance, it was so chilling.”
Sure enough, the harrowing scene blends history, horror, and the shared heritage of music in a scene as nail-biting as it is emotionally vulnerable.
Taking the thematic musings at play in the scene as a blueprint for his real-life discussion, Nolan continued on, “It’s really the most spectacular musical inversion since Kubrick’s ‘Singin’ in the Rain,’ [from A Clockwork Orange.] I mean, what did we [Irish] ever do to you?” Nolan’s second pick for best musical number was the 1971 Stanley Kubrick picture, based on the 1962 Anthony Burgess novel of the same name.
Arguably, this scene is even more gruesome than the vampiric horror-spiral at the heart of Sinners; a group of bandits con their way into the home of a couple to wreak havoc on their peaceful domesticity, all the while performing a staccato versio of ‘Singing in the Rain’, which was famously performed and danced by Gene Kelly in the classic 1952 movie musical of the same name. The guttural screams of a woman dressed in red, held hostage over the shoulder of one of the bandits, punctuate each line of the performance. Two suitably horrid picks from Nolan.
