Best movies like Rita the American Girl

Donald Hardwick (Dick Powell) is a stuffed-shirt, classical music professor. His family and small-town music college that he works are of equal mindset. When Don visits his black-sheep aunt in New York in order to find a buyer for his Rhapsody he is exposed to her shocking swing music crowd. His life begins to make dramatic changes after drinking a "lemonade" that turns out to be a Hurricane.

Connie Ward is in seventh heaven when Gene Morrison's band rolls into town. She is swept off her feet by trumpeter Bill Abbot. After marrying him, she joins the band's tour and learns about life as an orchestra wife, weathering the catty attacks of the other band wives.

A coming-of-age story centered around a small-town singer brokenhearted by the death of her brother in a car crash, who had secretly submitted her for a summer session at a performing arts academy in Los Angeles. In the academy, she experiences a whole new way of life in the big city, far from the small town lifestyle she's used to.

Fictionalized biography of George Gershwin and his fight to bring serious music to Broadway.

Rita, a vivacious co-ed is in love with her music teacher, a man who leads a double life - bespectacled professor by day and composer of rock songs by night. Will Rita win his heart?

A young Irishwoman comes to the United States to live and work with her mother as a cleaning lady at Carnegie Hall. She becomes attached to the place as the people she meets there gradually shape her life. The film also includes a variety of performances from some of the foremost musical artists of the times: conductors Bruno Walter & Leopold Stokowski, solists Arthur Rubinstein & Jascha Haifetz, singers Lily Pons & Jan Peerce and bandleader Vaughn Monroe among many others.

A fictionalised exploration of Beethoven's life in his final days working on his Ninth Symphony. It is 1824. Beethoven is racing to finish his new symphony. However, it has been years since his last success and he is plagued by deafness, loneliness and personal trauma. A copyist is urgently needed to help the composer. A fictional character is introduced in the form of a young conservatory student and aspiring composer named Anna Holtz. The mercurial Beethoven is skeptical that a woman might become involved in his masterpiece but slowly comes to trust in Anna's assistance and in the end becomes quite fond of her. By the time the piece is performed, her presence in his life is an absolute necessity. Her deep understanding of his work is such that she even corrects mistakes he has made, while her passionate personality opens a door into his private world.

One of the most spectacular and renowned conductors of the 1930s, Wilhelm Furtwangler's reputation rivaled that of Toscanini's. After the war, he was investigated as part of the Allies' de-Nazification programme. In the bombed-out Berlin of the immediate post-war period, the Allies slowly bring law and order to bear on an occupied Germany. An American major is given the Furtwangler file, and is told to find everything he can and to prosecute the man ruthlessly. Tough and hard-nosed, Major Steve Arnold sets out to investigate a world of which he knows nothing.

In this sequel to Four Daughters, Ann struggles to move on after the death of her husband as she falls in love with Felix, but on the day of her engagement discovers that she carries Mickey's child.

A con man comes to an Iowa town with a scam using a boy's marching band program, but things don't go according to plan.

An orchestra assembles for a rehearsal in an ancient chapel under the inquisitive eyes of a TV documentary crew, but an uprising breaks out.

In London for his daughter's wedding, a struggling jingle-writer, Harvey Shine, misses his plane to New York, and thus loses his job. While drowning his sorrows in the airport pub, Harvey meets Kate, a British government worker stuck in an endless cycle of work, phone calls from her mother, and blind dates. A connection forms between the unhappy pair, who soon find themselves falling in love.

In the hip Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, single dad and record store owner Frank is preparing to send his hard-working daughter Sam off to college while being forced to close his vintage shop. Hoping to stay connected through their shared musical passions, Frank urges Sam to turn their weekly jam sessions into a father-daughter live act. After their first song becomes an internet breakout, the two embark on a journey of love, growing up and musical discovery.

The incredible tale of Mozart's Prague years.

A chronicle of the life of infamous classical composer Ludwig van Beethoven and his painful struggle with hearing loss. Following Beethoven's death in 1827, his assistant, Schindler, searches for an elusive woman referred to in the composer's love letters as "immortal beloved." As Schindler solves the mystery, a series of flashbacks reveal Beethoven's transformation from passionate young man to troubled musical genius.

Roger Daltrey of The Who stars as 19th century genius pianist Franz Liszt in this brash, loud and free-wheeling rock 'n' roll fantasia centered around an imagined rivalry between Liszt and composer Richard Wagner-- painted here as a vampiric harbinger of doom and destruction.

Director William Dieterle's 1956 film biography of classical composer Richard Wagner stars Carlos Thompson, Yvonne De Carlo, Rita Gam, Alan Badel and Valentina Cortese.

Famed composer Gustav Mahler reflects on the tragedies of his life and failing marriage while traveling by train.

Con man "Professor" Harold Hill arrives in River City, Iowa, promising that he can teach the small town's children how to play in a magnificent marching band. It's all part of a big swindle, but falling in love with the town librarian wasn't part of the deal.

An African American couple (Winfield and Alice) adopt two orphans from a Vietnamese refugee camp. After twenty-two years, the children are reunited with their birth mother, bringing deeply submerged resentments and misconceptions to the surface and forcing the characters to reexamine their identity and relationships in both comical and poignant situations.

Ethan Hawke directs this intimate documentary portrait of classical pianist, composer, author, teacher and sage Seymour Bernstein.

A sailor helps two sisters start up a service canteen. The sailor soon becomes taken with gorgeous sister Jean, unaware that her sibling Patsy is also in love with him.

On the keyboard, the young hands fly rapidly and the melody rises. For the child, nothing is easier; he hears the sounds in his head. These hands belong to 6 years old André Mathieu. He won his audiences and fired up concerts halls in London, New York, Paris and around the world. Adulated, hailed, praised, the child prodigy seemed to have everything to succeed. From the top of his vertiginous successes, to depths of torment, the life of the "Little Canadian Mozart" blends into his music. A romantic and passionate composer wishing for happiness, his story is nevertheless played on tragic notes.

Hammersmith Odeon, London, July 3, 1973. British singer David Bowie performs his alter ego Ziggy Stardust for the very last time. A decadent show, a hallucinogenic collage of kitsch, pop irony and flamboyant excess: a musical symbiosis of feminine passion and masculine dominance that defines Bowie's art and the glam rock genre.

A tangled web of affairs is weaved around actress, Desirée Armfeldt, and the men who love her: a lawyer by the name of Fredrik Egerman and the Count Carl-Magnus Malcom. When the traveling actress performs in Fredrik's town, the estranged lovers' passion rekindles.

Documentary chronicaling the rise and fall of the punk movement with rare interview footage of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. Also concert and news footage.

It is about a music school in Philadelphia, The Paul Green School of Rock Music, run by Paul Green that teaches kids ages 9 to 17 how to play rock music and be rock stars. Paul Green teaches his students how to play music such as Black Sabbath and Frank Zappa better than anyone expects them to by using a unique style of teaching that includes getting very angry and acting childish.

Margot, a world-renowned pianist, returns to Chateau Newhaus to spend the holidays with her family and is reunited with an ex who helps her rediscover her passion for music.

The life story of Italian violinist and composer, Niccolò Paganini, who rose to fame as a virtuoso in the early 19th Century.

The year is 1764. For over a year, Josef has been leading a precarious life in Venice. He hopes to become an opera composer. The city, full of talented and already-established composers, seems closed to him. Looking for work as a violinist, he comes into the orbit of a rich young woman. Thanks to her, he gets the opportunity to play at salons. But his real opportunity arises when he becomes the lover of a libertine marquise. She teaches him worldly manners, rids him of signs of a provincial upbringing and introduces him to a hedonistic existence free from religious intolerance. Thus transformed, Josef gets an incan incredible commission: to write an opera for the San Carlo, Europe's largest theatre.

Chorus, Corpse de Ballet, Orchestra of the Minnisota Opera, the Whole Schmeer, under the direction of Professor Peter Schickele Based on several of Mozart's most famous Operas including The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutti and making fun of everything from Star Wars to the Maltese Falcon this is an Opera only PDQ Bach could have written.

Young man just out of college tries to persuade his father, who owns a record company, to start signing up rock 'n' roll acts.

Fifty years after his death, this musical and psychological portrait of Ralph Vaughan Williams explores the passions that drove a giant of 20th-century English music.

In the pre-civil war American south, Emanuelle, a plantation owner's daughter, while outwardly a dainty southern belle, brutally abuses the slaves in her charge. When her fiance is bitten by a snake, he falls for Emanuelle's beautiful African-American maid who's kindness and skill saved his life. Insanely jealous, Emanuelle continues her sadistic behaviour towards her charges, and when her fiance announces he plans to wed the maid, Emanuelle "gives" her to her even more brutal hired men, and her fiance is powerless to stop them. Can Emanuelle learn an important lesson in love before it's too late for everyone?

A drama based on the life of 18th century Italian lyricist Lorenzo da Ponte, who collaborated with Mozart on his "Don Giovanni" opera.