The 15 Best Recent Movie Musicals Damien Chazelle’s breezy new throwback musical La La Land is earning rave reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and is already considered an Oscar front-runner. Before the Emma Stone/Ryan Gosling film opens in limited release on December 9, we’ve decided to put La La Land in context by running down a list of The 15 Best Recent Movie Musicals of the last twenty years, which you can check out in the gallery below! RELATED: Ryan Gosling & Emma Stone Soar in New La La Land Trailer Like the western, musicals are often mentioned as a dying genre, but like westerns at least one prominent musical seems to pop up like clockwork every year or two.