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Best Dancing Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of dancing cinema — measured across 2,012 indexed frames from 25 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

Dancing films over-index on tuxedo, spotlight and dress — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.

  1. 1

    Showgirls (1995)

    Paul VerhoevenDP Jost VacanoIMDb 5.1TMDB 5.6See in full on FrameThrower →

    All alone in the world, Nomi Malone, making her way to Las Vegas, is determined to make a name as a dancer while putting her unspoken past behind her. Her tough, streetwise veneer is not as infallible as she would like, she, as she arrives in Vegas, becoming more cautious in the way she approaches strangers who seem willing to help her purely out of the goodness of their heart. Her talent and connections in combination are only able to get her a job at the Cheetah Club, a strip joint. Her first true friend in Vegas, Molly Abrams, works as the costumer for Goddess, the topless production at the Stardust. It is through Molly that Nomi catches the eye of Goddess' headliner, Cristal Connors. Nomi has a love/hate feeling toward Cristal: she doesn't much like her but wants to become her. Being at the Stardust, Nomi also catches the eye of Cristal's boyfriend, Zack Carey, Stardust's entertainment director. Through these contacts, Nomi is presented opportunity after opportunity to be part of the Stardust/Goddess family. She has to decide how far she will go to achieve her dream. James Smith, a struggling dancer/choreographer who works whatever odd jobs he can get and who is also attracted to Nomi largely for her natural albeit very raw talent, doesn't see Nomi's chosen path as the one she should pursue as he considers Goddess illegitimate: while the Cheetah is what it appears on the surface, Goddess is the Cheetah hiding behind its big name. Through it all, Nomi will discover the good, the bad and the very bad about Vegas life, especially among the rich and beautiful.

  2. 2

    La La Land (2016)

    Damien ChazelleDP Linus SandgrenIMDb 8.0TMDB 7.9See in full on FrameThrower →

    Mia, an aspiring actress, serves lattes to movie stars in between auditions and Sebastian, a jazz musician, scrapes by playing cocktail party gigs in dingy bars, but as success mounts they are faced with decisions that begin to fray the fragile fabric of their love affair, and the dreams they worked so hard to maintain in each other threaten to rip them apart.

  3. 3

    45 Years (2015)

    Andrew HaighDP Lol CrawleyIMDb 7.1TMDB 6.6See in full on FrameThrower →

    Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff Mercer (Sir Tom Courtenay) are planning to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary with dozens of friends. The event is to take place soon in the community hall of Norwich, the town near which they live. A week before the party, Geoff receives a letter which, although he tries to hide it, obviously troubles him. When his wife asks him what is going on, Geoff tells her that the body of Katya, his first great love who disappeared fifty years before in the Alps, has just been found in a melting glacier. From then on, Geoff starts behaving more and more strangely and for the first time after so many years Kate asks herself who the man she married so long ago really is.

  4. 4

    Addams Family Values (1993)

    Barry SonnenfeldDP Donald PetermanIMDb 6.9TMDB 7.0See in full on FrameThrower →

    When an adorable baby boy is added to the Addams household, Wednesday and Pugsley do not hate him, they just aren't necessarily excited about his existence. OK...yeah, they do hate him. So they plot to get rid of him one way or another. Meanwhile, their parents hire a nanny for him and she charms Fester, but has evil intentions for him. The Addamses must stop her, but how?

  5. 5

    Black Swan (2010)

    Darren AronofskyDP Matthew LibatiqueIMDb 8.0TMDB 7.7See in full on FrameThrower →

    Nina (Portman) is a ballerina in a New York City ballet company whose life, like all those in her profession, is completely consumed with dance. She lives with her obsessive former ballerina mother Erica (Hershey) who exerts a suffocating control over her. When artistic director Thomas Leroy (Cassel) decides to replace prima ballerina Beth MacIntyre (Ryder) for the opening production of their new season, Swan Lake, Nina is his first choice. But Nina has competition: a new dancer, Lily (Kunis), who impresses Leroy as well. Swan Lake requires a dancer who can play both the White Swan with innocence and grace, and the Black Swan, who represents guile and sensuality. Nina fits the White Swan role perfectly but Lily is the personification of the Black Swan. As the two young dancers expand their rivalry into a twisted friendship, Nina begins to get more in touch with her dark side - a recklessness that threatens to destroy her.

  6. 6

    Flashdance (1983)

    Adrian LyneDP Donald PetermanIMDb 6.2TMDB 6.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    Alex Owens is a female dynamo: steel worker by day, exotic dancer by night. Her dream is to get into a real dance company, though, and with encouragement from her boss/boyfriend, she may get her chance. The city of Pittsburgh co-stars. What a feeling!

  7. 7

    Suspiria (1977)

    Dario ArgentoDP Luciano TovoliIMDb 7.3TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    Suzy Bannion travels to Germany to perfect her ballet skills. She arrives at the Tanz dance academy in the pouring rain and is refused admission after another woman is seen fleeing the school. She returns the next morning and this time is let in. She learns that the young woman she saw fleeing the previous evening, Pat Hingle, has been found dead. Strange things soon begin to occur. Suzy becomes ill and is put on a special diet; the school becomes infested with maggots; odd sounds abound; and Daniel, the pianist, is killed by his own dog. A bit of research indicates that the ballet school was once a witches' coven - and as Suzy learns, still is.

  8. 8

    Get Smart (2008)

    Peter SegalDP Dean SemlerIMDb 6.5TMDB 6.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    American Maxwell Smart works for a Government spy agency in an administrative capacity. When the agency's head office is attacked, the Chief decides to assign Maxwell as a spy and partners him with sexy Agent 99, much to her chagrin. The duo nevertheless set off to combat their attackers by first parachuting off an airplane and landing in Russian territory - followed closely by an over seven feet tall, 400 pound goon, known simply as Dalip. The duo, handicapped by Maxwell's antics, will eventually have their identities compromised, and may be chalked up as casualties, while back in America their attackers have already planted a bomb that is set-up to explode in a concert.

  9. 9

    Magic Mike XXL (2015)

    Gregory JacobsDP Steven SoderberghIMDb 5.6TMDB 6.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    It's been three years since Tampa based Mike Lane transitioned from the life of a stripper - his stage name being Magic Mike - to his dream of starting his own custom furniture business, those three years mixed in terms of the goods and bads for him personally. His ex-troupe, the Kings of Tampa, minus who was their boss, Dallas, stop off in Tampa from their current home base in Miami on a road trip to a stripper convention in Myrtle Beach. As the remaining troupe members are nearing the end of their stripping lives, they, like Mike, who are at an advanced age beyond that of most strippers, they see this convention as their final hurrah in this life. Mike decides to join his old friends on the road trip to this send off. The current troupe members start to have their own dreams about their futures in being with Mike, while Mike has his own envy of his friends in his current life not being everything he hoped it would be. But especially without Dallas at the helm, the troupe members are feeling a bit lost, with Mike trying to inspire them, which he may or may not be able to do. As they make several stops along the way, they encounter many groups of women, which may demonstrate whether their thoughts about what to do at the convention is a good idea in if they still have what it takes. Beyond these encounters with women, the trip itself hits its bumps, with Mike needing to call in some favors and mend some bridges even to make it to Myrtle Beach, it not certain if those at the other end will accept Mike's pleas for help or his apologies.

  10. 10

    Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

    David O. RussellDP Masanobu TakayanagiIMDb 7.7TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    Against medical advice and without the knowledge of her husband Pat Solatano Sr., caring Dolores Solatano discharges her adult son, Pat Solatano Jr., from a Maryland mental health institution after his minimum eight-month court ordered stint. The condition of the release includes Pat Jr. moving back in with his parents in their Philadelphia home. Although Pat Jr.'s institutionalization was due to him beating up the lover of his wife Nikki, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Nikki has since left him and has received a restraining order against him. Although he is on medication (which he doesn't take because of the way it makes him feel) and has mandatory therapy sessions, Pat Jr. feels like he can manage on the outside solely by healthy living and looking for the "silver linings" in his life. His goals are to get his old job back as a substitute teacher, but more importantly reunite with Nikki. He finds there are certain instances where he doesn't cope well; however, no less so than some others who have never been institutionalized, such as his Philadelphia Eagles obsessed father who has resorted to being a bookie to earn a living, his best friend Ronnie who quietly seethes over the control wielded by his wife Veronica, and Veronica's widowed sister, Tiffany Maxwell, a girl with problems of her own. In their fragile mental states, Pat Jr. and Tiffany embark on a love/hate friendship based primarily on what help the other can provide in achieving their individual goals. But they may reevaluate their goals as their relationship progresses.

What dancing films are made of

How much more often each element appears in a dancing frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — tuxedo is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.

  • tuxedo4.8×
  • spotlight4.7×
  • dress2.7×
  • mirror2.6×
  • neon sign2.6×
  • necklace1.8×
  • glasses1.7×
  • curtains1.7×

How dancing films are shot

Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate dancing from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.

  • 18%high keyvs 12% baseline
  • 33%naturalvs 43% baseline
  • 33%dayvs 42% baseline
  • 86%eye levelvs 69% baseline

What breaks the pattern

The Addams Family (1991) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.

Method

Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 2,012 frames from 25 films carrying the dancing label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (408,752 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.

Machine-readable: /api/list/dancing

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