The 29 Best Music Moments In Film This Year

The dance the hotel throws in The Lobster is like an extraterrestrial's re-creation of a human ritual based on vintage holiday pamphlets. The women are all dressed in identical halter dresses, the men in identical suits. Couples sway dutifully on the dance floor or eye each other across the room, while the venue's manager provides the entertainment — Olivia Colman and Garry Mountaine solemnly belt out "Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart" to inspire their charges toward mandatory romance.

Like so much of Howard's (John Goodman) underground bunker, Tommy James and the Shondells' take on "I Think We're Alone Now" is vintage wholesomeness made creepy. The song, as played on Howard's jukebox, becomes the soundtrack to a montage in which the survivalist and his guests and/or prisoners Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) settle in to spend the apocalypse as a parody of a happy family — watching movies, playing board games, trying not to think about what's happening above ground. The lyrics are perfectly on the nose.

It's nice to know that the work of the Beastie Boys endured into the future in which Star Trek Beyond takes place...where it's considered "classical music." And on top of that, it has the ability to save the day. When the Enterprise cranks up "Sabotage," it becomes a weapon, the crew anxiously grooving to the song as they take out an enemy fleet.

Kleber Mendonça Filho's film is overflowing with good tunes — after all, its main character, the force of nature that is Clara (Sonia Braga), had a long and storied career as a music journalist. The soundtrack features songs from Filho's fellow Brazilians like Gilberto Gil and Taiguara, but it also includes Queen, a band that looms large in one of the movie's most satisfying moments. The developer trying to pressure Clara out of her apartment arranges a rowdy blowout right upstairs to intimidate her, electronic music thumping and people shouting. But they don't know who they're messing with. Clara pours herself some wine and retaliates by blasting some music of her own. When the opening harmonies of "Fat Bottomed Girls" block out the neighboring ruckus, she starts a party of one that rivals anything they could come up with.

When Houda Benyamina's terrific crime-drama-as-coming-of-age film begins, its hero, Dounia (Oulaya Amamra), is more interested in money than men. She wants to boost herself out of the crushing dead-end poverty in which she's been growing up. She wants to be somebody. Over the course of Divines, she grows confident of her own power in more ways than one. Dounia becomes an earner for local drug baron Rebecca (Jisca Kalvanda), and she comes to understand her own beauty, both via her romance with a moody dancer and via a mission to seduce another dealer. The latter offers the movie with its best music moment, when Dounia, tasked to get the man's attention at a club, jumps onto a platform as Azealia Banks' "212" blasts. Facing the camera in her white gown, with the light turning her hair into a halo, she invites and challenges the male gaze. For a brief window, the control is entirely hers.

The montage of Anthony Weiner launching his 2013 mayoral campaign early in the documentary Weiner doesn't just unfold to the sounds of Ace Frehley's "New York Groove";�it's cut rhythmically to Ace Frehley's "New York Groove." Weiner's campaign offices grow from sparsely populated to crowded in a series of edits on the beat, and a staffer unveils a "Weiner for Mayor" poster right as the chorus kicks in. We know the whole endeavor is doomed AF, but in that sequence, fueled by those oohs on the soundtrack, it feels for a second like maybe that asshole really could pull off the impossible.

The patron saint of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele's action comedy Keanu is not the adorable kitten of the title. It's George Michael. The pop star is suburban dad Clarence's (Key) favorite, which lands Clarence in hot water when the group of gang members he and his cousin (Peele) are trying to infiltrate pull up "Freedom! '90" on Clarence's playlist. Clarence attempts, amazingly, to save himself by convincing the gangsters that George Michael is both black and possessed of ferocious tough guy cred. "This the real OG up in here," he insists, eventually bonding with them all over "Father Figure" and the need for strong male role models.

This Jackie Chan and Johnny Knoxville buddy action comedy barely registered in the US, but there's one scene well worth a watch. While drunkenly sacked out by the fire in a Mongolian village, Chan's character launches into a rendition of "Rolling in the Deep." It's not a solo for long — the villagers start joining in, first with traditional instruments and then chiming in to sing the chorus. Adele crosses continents with considerably more ease than Chan's Hong Kong cop and Knoxville's American con man.

When is a cover song more than just a cover song? When it's an act of protest. Stranded and broke, Green Room's idealistic punk band the Ain't Rights end up getting stuck playing a gig at a skinhead venue in order to keep their tour going. They do it, but they're unhappy, sentiments they express by kicking off their set with a version of the Dead Kennedys classic "Nazi Punks Fuck Off." If the film's white-supremacist villains feel more immediate and alarming in the wake of the rise of the so-called "alt-right," the musical moment of rebellion is wonderfully uncomplicated — a raucous middle finger to a crowd invested in hate.

Morris (Markees Christmas) spends a lot of Morris From America dreaming about hip-hop, taking solace in it, and composing his own rhymes bragging about accomplishments that are, for all their casual misogyny, pretty hilarious from a boyish 13-year-old. (E.g., "Fuckin' all the bitches, two at a time / All you can take for just $10.99.") He's twice an outsider in the German city to which he and his father Curtis (Craig Robinson) have moved — they're American and, as Curtis puts it, the "only two brothers in Heidelberg." Hip-hop is key to Morris' identity, even if he's largely isolated in his love for it — when he does his Jay Z impression for his crush, she asks if Jay Z is the guy who's married to Beyoncé. All of which makes the moment in which Morris goes up on stage more rewarding; he abandons the empty braggadocio and performs from the heart. It's a little cheesy and a lot rewarding.

The funniest track in the Lonely Island’s mockumentary is “Finest Girl,” a parody of the “girl was a freak”-style song. Only here, the object of Connor4Real’s (Andy Samberg) lust turns out to be into things he isn’t prepared for — namely, Osama bin Laden role-play. Women in skimpy military-themed gear trot out behind him on stage as he performs next to a writing dancer who dons a turban and then a beard. Connor struggles to hold onto a comparison that's not only outrageous but labored. "I couldn't track the metaphor," he eventually admits, though it doesn't stop him from getting the crowd singing along to his fictional partner's request to "terrorize that pussy."

"Hello Stranger" by Barbara Lewis is the song that Kevin (André Holland) puts on the jukebox of the restaurant in which he's now a cook. It's fitting, since he's reconnecting with his childhood friend and eventual lover Chiron (Trevante Rhodes) after years. The look the two exchange as the music swells and the lyrics "Ooh, seems like a mighty long time" sound feels like it could put the world on pause.

Two tunes are key to Jia Zhangke's three-stage film. One's a Cantopop ballad by Sally Yeh that goes from innocuous to totally heartbreaking over the film's first two sections. The other is Pet Shop Boys' bouncy "Go West," an exuberant ditty about the promise of the new that opens the film with hope in 1999, then returns to close it in 2025. By then, its sentiments have been transmuted into something so intensely bittersweet that you'll never hear the song the same way again.

You'll know if you're going to fall for La La Land by the end of its opening number, which starts on an overpass in standstill Los Angeles traffic. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone are there in their cars, but "Another Day of Son" is a group number in which their famous faces are, for a moment, unimportant. It's an ode to running off to Hollywood to chase your dreams, people getting out of cars, the camera swinging wide in a patched-together long take, big of old-fashioned movie magic erupting briefly out of the most mundane and infamous of the city's experiences.

Like La La Land, Sausage Party starts with a musical number that lets you know exactly what you're in for. In the case of Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen's raunchy animated comedy, that song is "The Great Beyond," a morning hymn belted out by the grocery residents of Shopwell's as they thanks the gods, otherwise known as shoppers, browsing the aisles of the store. The tune's reminiscent of a Disney number by design — it's composed by Beauty and the Beast's own Alan Menken. But its lyrics ("We're super sure there's nothing shitty waiting for us in the great beyond," for example) aren't ones you'll find in any kiddie flick.

Toni Erdmann is a movie about a semi-retired music teacher named Winfried (Peter Simonischek) whose attempt to reconnect with his estranged daughter Ines (Sandra Hüller) basically involves a series of stunts. The best is the one in which he announces Ines is going to sing in front of a party full of strangers, a challenge to which the no-nonsense businesswoman wonderfully and unexpectedly steps up. The song is the Whitney Houston classic "Greatest Love of All," and Ines' take is imperfect and impassioned, both funny and filled with hints at all kinds of difficult history between her and her father. It's enough to make you cry through your laughter.

With all due respect to those who boosted Deadpool to $782 million worldwide, what is by many miles the best part of the self-referential comic book movie takes place before it ever gets going. That would be the opening titles, during which dulcet sounds of Juice Newton's version of "Angel of the Morning" plays as the camera pans through a frozen scene of contrasting mayhem. The credits that appear on screen aren't names, they're a breakdown of the stock elements of the superhero genre, a set of self-referential jokes more brutal and clever than anything Ryan Reynolds' wisecracking mercenary will later cough up. The cast is listed as including "God's Perfect Idiot," "A Hot Chick," "A British Villain," and "A Gratuitous Cameo," while the producers are referred to as "Asshats." The embittered writers, at least, manage to pat themselves on the back, snagging the listing of "The Real Heroes Here."