Best Music Movies to Watch on Hoopla

It’s easy to classify Destroy All Neighbors as B-movie schlock; it unabashedly pays tribute to the low-budget comedy horror movies that pervaded the ‘80s. But it also feels too good for that. Elevated by funny bits, easy chemistry, solid production design, and a lightweight but easygoing script, Destroy All Neighbors never really wastes your time. […]

Whether or not you’re a fan of Nick Cave’s contemplative, idiosyncratic style of music, This Much I Know to Be True still works on a purely experiential level. There’s confusion, then a rush of euphoria, then an overwhelming sense of peace when listening to Cave’s (and musical collaborator Warren Ellis’s) cryptic lyrics and delicate compositions—shot […]

Frank Zappa’s creative scope could barely be defined –  a mix of rock, composition, design, and in his early days even filmmaking.  This documentary does its best to summarize the un-summarizable, starting with Zappa’s last time playing guitar and going back to early details like an infatuation with explosives as a kid.  Zappa’s overwhelmingly full […]

This drama is about two friends attempting to rave in 1994 Scotland, after a recent Thatcher-era law banned the act and all music “characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. Johnno and Spanner, one living in fear of his older brother and the other of his stepfather, want to turn things around […]

Here’s a biopic that focuses on capturing the feel of the era it depicts, rather than all the facts — and is all the better for it. 24 Hour Party People takes the same punk approach to storytelling as its subjects did to music, playfully throwing off the dull constraints that often make based-on-a-true-story movies […]

A biopic is only as big as the personality at its center, and what a personality Pavarotti had. The Opera singer that crossed into the mainstream from his humble upbringings in Modena, Italy, exuded happiness and had a great outlook on life. And even as the attention he would eventually attract takes its tole, he’s […]

Based in the 1970s, William Miller is a young high school student who hasn’t experienced much in life partially due to his over-protective mother and also due to his awkwardness. His only escape is through the music he listens to religiously. Senior year he stumbles upon the opportunity of a lifetime to write a story […]

This cult classic is the first hip-hop movie in cinema’s history — and, aptly, one of the most sampled movies in rap music. With a cast drawn exclusively from the NYC graffiti, breakdancing, and rap subcultures that it spotlights, Wild Style wisely doesn’t try too hard to construct a conventional drama. Instead, there are toe-tapping […]

This is a low-scale, intimate, almost minimalist movie that speaks volumes about the misconceptions that westerners have regarding the Middle-East. And the performance of Richard Jenkins is absolutely exceptional (earned him a nomination for the Oscars). He plays a professor who comes back to his New York apartment only to find two immigrants living in it. What […]

Similar in spirit and in subject matter to the Oscar-winning documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, The Wrecking Crew pulls back the curtain on the recording of many of the greatest American songs of the 1960s and ’70s: that a single group of unassuming session musicians were responsible for bringing out the sound in these tracks. […]

A Swedish film about a world-famous conductor who suddenly interrupts his career to return alone to his childhood village in Norrland. It doesn’t take long before he is asked to come and listen to the fragment of a church choir, which practices every Thursday in the parish hall. “Just come along and give a little bit of […]

For the background singers featured in 20 Feet from Stardom, music is a vocation. It is not merely an occupation or a pastime; it is a way of life, a “higher calling,” as the legendary Lisa Fischer would say. For 90 minutes, director Morgan Neville superbly maps out the development of back-up singing in the […]

We Are the Best! is one movie that may be overlooked largely by viewers, though it perfectly captures counterculture, and relates to the misfit young and old. The movie is an adaptation of Moodysson’s wife Coco’s graphic novel “Never Goodnight”. Set in Stockholm, Sweden in 1982, Klara (Mira Grosin) and her best friend Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) are […]

A Canadian film with a title based off Cockney rhyming slang meaning “it’s all gone a bit wrong,” it’s All Gone Pete Tong is an offbeat and bleak comedy. Starring Paul Kaye as Frankie Wilde, a successful club DJ who begins to go deaf at the height of his fame. As news of his disability […]

This documentary is about the life of New York rapper Nas around the time of the release of his first album, Illmatic. It spans a quick and summarized 74 minutes and, while embellished by the direction of street artist One9, it remains a great snippet of recent American history. Nas’s album was a reflection of […]