The 10 most memorable dances in non-musicals

Dance was an integral part of motion pictures long before Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers tapped their way into the hearts of Depression-era moviegoers. In the 1890s, Thomas Edison shot footage of Ruth St. Denis performing her famous “skirt dance.” Not to be outdone, France’s Lumière Brothers captured a “serpentine dance” around the same period in which the performer’s costume magically changes color before our eyes thanks to the painstaking work of some poor bastard who had to paint each frame by hand. Hoofers found stardom in scores of movie musicals that ranged from the human kaleidoscopes imagined by Busby Berkeley to Gene Kelly’s euphoric stomp and splash in Singin’ in the Rain. But there are plenty of memorable dances in non-musicals. Here are the 10 best, in my opinion …

10. Poor Things (2023, dir: Yorgos Lanthimos)

The dances in the films of director Yorgos Lanthimos make me feel better about my own questionable sense of rhythm. In Poor Things, free-spirited woman-child Bella Baxter, played by a fearless Emma Stone, teaches herself to dance when she is literally moved by the music she hears in the banquet hall of a luxury liner. Her awkward reaction prompts her suitor, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), to join her and try taking the lead, attempting in vain to make Bella’s jerky gyrations look like something resembling an actual dance. Lanthimos’ fisheye lens accentuates the weirdness.

9. The Breakfast Club (1985, dir: John Hughes)

Back in the 1980s, smoking weed would inspire me to listen to Pink Floyd, eat Doritos and sleep, and in that order. Marijuana never made me want to dance, but then again, I never inhabited a John Hughes movie montage. For the five high (and I do mean high) school kids serving Saturday morning detention in his hit The Breakfast Club, pot leads to a particularly iconic scene with stars Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy dancing to the perky strains of Karla DeVito’s “We Are Not Alone.” If the weed-as-catalyst aspect is a little suspect, the montage makes more sense in the context of the story, as the teens slip out of their cliques to interact. Ironically, the scene only happened because Ringwald, whom the screenplay had called for to dance by herself, was self-conscious about doing so. To make her more comfortable, writer-director Hughes made the last-minute decision to have all the characters strut their stuff.

8 . Dogtooth (2009, dir: Yorgos Lanthimos)

Yorgos Lanthimos’ absurdist comedy (or however this Greek-language oddity can be classified) concerns an ultra-sheltered family whose grown children are not allowed to leave the property. Dogtooth features strange scenes followed by even stranger scenes, but an especially indelible image is a dance in which the daughters perform for their parents’ anniversary. In a stationary medium shot, the camera underscores the bizarreness of the women’s kinda-sorta synchronized routine, which soon becomes a solo for the older daughter (Angeliki Papoulia) to do an unhinged version of Jennifer Beals’ moves in Flashdance, albeit more disturbing and spastic. 

7. Another Round (2020, dir: Thomas Vinterberg)

Director Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, a Danish comedy-drama about excessive boozing, ends with a triumphant dance by Mads Mikkelsen as Martin, an emotionally repressed high-school teacher who has long dismissed entreaties by his friends to demonstrate his long-dormant training in jazz ballet. After enduring the extreme highs and lows of alcohol, the film ends with Martin and two fellow teachers crashing their students’ graduation party. Martin finally decides to dance—and boy, does he ever. As choreographed by Olivia Anselmo to Scarlet Pleasure’s “What a Life,” Mikkelsen, a former dancer himself, spins, cartwheels, swings around and generally embodies raw joy before leaping into Copenhagen Harbour for a well-timed freeze frame.

6. Napoleon Dynamite (2004, dir: Jared Hess)

The quirky comedy about an endearingly nerdy nerd’s nerd culminates with the titular character shaking his groove thing at a high-school talent show. Accompanied by Jamiroquai’s “Canned Heat,” Napoleon’s goofy but impressive brand of funk wins over a skeptical student body. The scene was created specifically for Jon Heder, who plays Napoleon, by husband-and-wife filmmakers Jared and Jerusha Hess, as Jared had seen Heder do his thing back when they were students together at Brigham Young University. The dance was pure improvisation, Heder recalled years later, according to PEOPLE magazine. “It was all freestyle,” he said. “You suckers who tried to learn the moves and do it for your middle school talent show wasted time.” 

5. Young Frankenstein (1974, dir: Mel Brooks)

In Young Frankenstein, comic maestro Mel Brooks’ spoof of the legendary horror tale, Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) is intent on showing a theater audience of well-to-do’s that his man-made creation (Peter Boyle) can be a “cultured, sophisticated man-about-town.” The good doctor and his monster, both decked out in tuxedos and top hats, do so by tapdancing to Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” All goes splendidly until a stage light pops, the creature is thrown off, and things go bad. If not for the stubbornness of Wilder, who penned the screenplay, the bit wouldn’t have happened. As Brooks tells it in his memoir, All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business, the director believed the scene was so absurd that movie audiences would never accept it. But Wilder was insistent, telling Brooks, “Film it and we’ll take a look at it. If it doesn’t work, I promise we’ll throw it out.” Turns out it worked. 

4. Pulp Fiction (1994, dir: Quentin Tarantino)

In a movie that does not lack for iconic scenes, Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece Pulp Fiction also marked a welcome return to big-screen dancing for John Travolta, whose starmaking performance in 1977’s Saturday Night Fever helped turn disco into a worldwide phenomenon. Here he plays hitman Vincent Vega, tasked with showing his boss’ flirty wife, Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), a good time while her husband is away on business. At retro diner Jack Rabbit Slim’s, Mia demands that Vincent be her partner for a twist dance contest. Then they wait a few awkward seconds for the music, Chuck Berry’s percolating “You Never Can Tell,” before launching into a dance-off as sexy as it is delightful.

3. Climax (2018, dir: Gaspar Noé)

This feel-bad French-language entry from writer-director Gaspar Noé details a party for a dance troupe that goes south, to put it extremely mildly, when someone laces a punchbowl of sangria with copious amounts of LSD. But Climax begins on a deceptively buoyant note. For five dazzling minutes, Noé celebrates the gritty allure of street dance with a dizzying volley of moves from characters we will soon meet. Choreographed by Nina McNeely to Cerrone’s “Supernature,” the dance incorporates a wealth of styles that allow individual dancers to shine. In a single shot, Noé’s camera captures the action head on, swooping overhead and around the performers. It is carnal, exhilarating and chaotic – and it hints at the violence that will shortly follow.

2. RRR (2022, dir: S.S. Rajamouli)

A surprise international hit, the Telugu-language Indian import RRR is a big, bombastic historical actioner with a charmingly over-the-top aesthetic. Writer-director S.S. Rajamouli and choreographer Prem Rakshith bring that more-is-more approach to a rousing set piece in which N.T. Rama Rao Jr. and Ram Charan, playing a pair of Indian freedom fighters, show a party of stodgy British colonialists what it means to really dance. Belting out “Naatu Naatu,” an original song written for RRR, Rao and Charan provide an onslaught of synchronized snapping suspenders, ginormous kicks, flapping arms and shoulder rolls in an epic expression of sovereign pride. You’ll be exhausted simply watching it.

1. The Big Lebowski (1998, dir: Joel Coen)
Filmmaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen have lovingly goosed Hollywood over the years with a host of genre sendups, but arguably none as memorable as the “Gutterballs” sequence in cult fave The Big Lebowski, where psychedelia meets Busby Berkeley-styled dance production. After being drugged by a porn movie tycoon, stoner burnout hero Jeff Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) drifts into a beautifully staged and photographed dream sequence that interweaves bowling (Lebowski’s sport of choice), sex (bowling balls and pins have their phallic possibilities, go figure), Saddam Hussein (The Big Lebowski is set during the First Gulf War) and a thoroughly surrealistic vibe. A wild-eyed Bridges gamely shakes his ass to the strains of Kenny Rogers & The First Edition’s ‘60s-era freakout anthem, “I Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” before floating down a bowling lane, under the skirts of chorus line dancers donning 10-pin headdresses.