There’s no business like show business — and there’s no movie like a movie about the entertainment industry. Hollywood loves m🐓aking films about itself, and luckily for audiences, a lot of those movies are pretty great.
Whether adapting the story of a famous event in the entertainment industry’s history, showcasing an exaggerated knowing parody of the business, or setting a genre like noir or horror in "Hollyweird", there are lots of 🐷ways for movies to show the fun side of show business. For close to a century now, Hollywood’s been interested in giving audiences a peek behind the curtain (and, frequently, itself a pat on the back), but there are also movies about Broadway, the music business, and more.
Here are 33 of the best sh♔owbiz movies of all time. Note that although many musician biopics deal with the business side of the movie industry, the music biopic is a subgenre worthy of a list all on its own, so you won’t find the likes of Elvis or Walk the Line here. What you will find, though, is a wide range of great films—many of which are, in fact, about great fil🐼ms.
33. Saturday Night
Year: 2024
Director: Jason Reitman
Your mileage may vary on Saturday Night, depending on how deserving you think SNL is of this hagiography. Regardless, the ❀Jason Reitman comedy is a zippy, funny tour through the madcap nature of live television, taking place almost in real-time in the hours before the series premiere. An ensemble of performers doing uncannily great jobs playing comedy legends like Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) and Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O'Brien) in their prime make Saturday Night into a charming (if exaggerated) trip down memory lane when the sketch show, an institution that’s been around for a half-century, was a new and risky showbiz venture.
32. The Substance
Year: 2024
Director: Coralie Fargeat
This Best Picture-nominated French body horror flick doesn’t accurately capture show business🦋 (there’s typically less gore, for starters), but there is a degree of truth amidst all the ick. An exceptional Demi Moore plays an aging star who, upon unceremoniously getting canned when she turns 50, starts using a black market drug that spawns a younger, "hotter" version of herself (Margaret Qualley). Problems arise when the two don’t want to share and begin using the titular Substance improperly. Grotesque and definitely not for everyone, The Substance is a thrilling and unique take on one of the ugly realities of the industry.
23. The Fall Guy
Year: 2024
Director: David Leitch
Director David Leitch got his start as a stunt double, so it’s only natural that he would want to make a movie celebrating one of the most undersung—and inherently dangerous—jobs in Hollywood. Ryan Gosling stars as a stuntman who, when working on a big sci-fi movie directed by his ex-girlfriend (Emily Blunt), uncovers a very real conspiracy theory that has him doing all those dangerous stunts when the cameras aren’t rolling and without a net. You’ll laugh and be wowed at the incredible achievements of stunt performers in this charming ac🔜tion comedy.
9. Perfect Blue
Year: 1997
Director: Satoshi Kon
One of the most prescient movies ever made, the late, great anime director Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue follows Mima (Junko Iwao), a singer who quits the girl group she’s part of in an attempt to ꦜbecome an actress. However, she’s plagued with doubts that she’s making the right call, and she has way-too-devoted fans who are angry at her for ditching pop idoldom. The internet, which in the late ‘90s was a relatively new and not-yet-ubiquitous thing, further complicates things, leading to a terrifying b♚lurring of reality. Perfect Blue is uncanny in how it predicts the ugliness of fan culture and the net’s impact on celebrity.
8. All About Eve
Year: 1950
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
The🅠 Best Picture winner at the 23rd Academy Awards, All About Eve is a tale about the ruthlessness of show business, starring Bette Davis as Margo Channing, an aging Broadway star, and Anne Baxter as the titular Eve, a young fan who worms her way into Margo’s life. It soon becomes apparent that Eve is more ambitious than her innocent demeanor would suggest. Regarded to be one of the great films, All About Eve is a delectable look at the cutthroat world of ent𝓡ertainment, with cutting dialog from Joseph L. Mankiewicz (younger brother of Citizen Kane scribe and Mank protagonist Herman J. Mankiewicz) to match.
7. All That Jazz
Year: 1979
Director: Bob Fosse
A thinly veiled and brutally honest se🌟lf-port📖rait, Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz is inspired by his struggles staging a Broadway play while also trying to finish editing a movie—and how he was generally terrible to everybody in his life in the process. An atypical musical that will convert even those who proclaim to hate musicals, All That Jazz is a thrilling, entertaining, and unflinching look at the toils of talent and ego. Roy Scheider stars as Joe Gideon, the director-choreographer who is basically a stand-in for Fosse.
6. Tropic Thunder
Year: 2008
Director: Ben Stiller
On its face, a parody of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best war movies, Ben Stiller’s action comedy Tropic Thunder is really an explosive farce of the movie industry in general. Stiller plays an A-list actor who signs up for a star-studded war movie following an embarrassing, Oscar-chasing bomb. Once on location, though, he and his🍰 fellow stars find themselves in actual danger with an actual fight on their hands — one that their bigwig Hollywood agents (Tom Cruise in a hilariously against-type role) can’t fight for them.
5. Mulholland Drive
Year: 2001
Director: David Lynch
Another movie about making movies that’s widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time, David Lynch’s surrealist masterpiece is intentionally difficult to make total sense of. And yet despite (or, perhaps, because of) that fuzzy ambiguity, it perfectly encapsulates the bizarre dream that is showbiz. Naomi Watts stars as a naive young actress who comes to LA looking to make it big, only to encounter a mysterious amnesiac woman 🉐(Laura Harring). As the pair grows close while attempting to recover lost memories, sinister, confounding Hollywood forces begin to make themselves known.
4. Ed Wood
Year: 1994
Director: Tim Burton
And now for a change of pace: instead of one of the greatest movies ever made, how about a film about the director of some of the worst films ever made? Johnny Depp stars as Ed Wood, a filmmaker in the ‘50s known for sci-fi and horror films that were several letters of the alphabet below B movies in quality. And yet, despite how poor the final products like Plan 9 From Outer Space m✱ay have been (and they were very bad), Wood’s earnest creative drive and unique personality are a joy to behold, and Burton’s biopic is a celebration of the 𝄹losers of showbiz rather than a mockery of them. Martin Landau won an Oscar for his role as Bela Lugosi, the Dracula actor who befriended Wood in his final years.
3. Sunset Boulevard
Year: 1950
Director: Billy Wilder
“Alright, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up." Gloria Swanson stars as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, o🙈ne of the all-time great film noirs and Hollywood movies. When a struggling screenwriter (William Holden) encounters a reclusive, well past-her-prime star from the silent era, he realizes that feeding her 🅷delusions of a comeback could be his meal ticket. However, as is often the case in Hollywood, egos and jealousy make everything much more complicated.
2. Singin’ in the Rain
Year: 1952
Directors: Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen
A candy-colored delight of a film, Singin’ in the Rain documents the transition from the silent era to the rise of talkies — and the effect it had on the stars of the day — with the wit and grace that only Gene Kelly could pull off. Kelly, who choreographed the film in addition to directing and starring in it, plays silent star Don Lockwood. When the onset of sound threatens his career, 𒁏he finds a solution thanks to a spirited, lovely young aspiring actress (Debbie Reynolds). It’ll take a little deception, a lot of laughs, and a ton of dancing. Singin’ in the Rain is Hollywood depicting itself in the brightest way possible, and it’s impossible not to smile as Kelly does indeed dance and sing in the rain.
1. Babylon
Year: 2022
Director: Damien Chazelle
On the one hand, it’s sacrilege to rank Babylon above Singin’ in the Rain when you talk about the best showbiz movies, seeing as Damien Chazelle’s cult classic, box office bomb of a masterpiece, is a hectic mirror of Singin’ in the Rain that goes so far as to reference the ‘52 film in its climax directly. On the other hand, Babylon is an absolute triumph that makꦐes the silent era very, very loud. Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and Diego Calva star as actors and a producer, respectively, in 1920s Hollywood when cinema was at its most hedonistic excess. You will never look at old movies the same way after seeing Ba🐻bylon—nor will you ever look at an elephant the same, for reasons that will become clear minutes into this three-hour epic ode to films and the people who make them.
James is an entertainment writer and editor with more than a decade of journalism experience. He has edited for Vulture, Inverse, and SYFY WIRE, and he’s written for TIME, Polygon, SPIN, Fatherly, GQ, and more. He is based in Los Angওeles. He is really good at that one level of Mario Kart: Double Das🌼h where you go down a volcano.
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