With the release of RocknRolla today, we thought what better time than now to look back over our favourite music-themed movies.

A Hard Day's Night

Richard Lester's prototypical pop movie captures a moment when pop stars could unselfconsciously wallow in their fame. It's a product of its time, but there's enough gobby humour and cooking concert footage from the Fab Four to keep it fresh.

Greatest Hit: “John Lennon, you're a swine!” The Beatles' long-suffering manager cuts through the chirpy cant with the film's closing note.

No Direction Home

Even at 205 minutes, Scorsese's enormo-doc could make Bobcats out of those who struggle to see the appeal of Dylan's musical adventures. Despite a lack of drugs and a typically guarded Dylan, Scorsese brings an era to life via the man who was a lightning rod for its hopes, disappointments and cultural shifts.

“So many young people don't understand the power of the time,” says Marty. Problem solved here.

Greatest Hit: A worryingly intense hack asks Bob how many of his musical peers are “protest singers”. “About 136,” Dylan muses. “Either 136… or 142…”

Control

“It's not a music film,” director Anton Corbijn insists. “It's about a boy…”

Still, you can't really take the music out of Ian Curtis's rise and fatalistic fall, but Corbijn's spectral biopic divines the real, raw life in the Joy Division head boy's mythology.

There's a bawdy, mystique-debunking wit and compassion to this much-told but never-bettered tale – a shifting brew of heart, humour and honesty that amplifies Curtis's tragedy without deifying him.

Greatest Hit: Curtis dies, Debbie howls and Joy Division's Atmosphere rises from the ashes, transcendent after the tragedy.

This is Spinal Tap

Jurassic-rock larks from a band that drips idiocy. Director Rob Reiner drew on the likes of The Kids Are Alright and The Last Waltz to create a world in which The Song Remains The Same – and ill-matched sandwich-to-filling combinations – would never look the same again.

Reiner recalls his cameraman being somewhat bemused: “He kept saying, 'What's funny about this? This is exactly what goes on!'” You know what to turn it up to…

Greatest Hit: Tap's non-armadillo-enhanced Stonehenge stage set-up turns out to be so small, it's in danger of being crushed. By a dwarf.

I'm Not There

Bob Dylan moves in slippery, shapeshifting ways in Todd Haynes' biopic-as-deconstruction that's cannily named after an obscure Basement Tapes number.

Having waxed chameleonic with Velvet Goldmine, Haynes mines multiple Dylans – from formative folkie to stick-thin mid-Sixties pill-popping hipster, poet to protest singer, actor to ageing lone gun.

Fittingly, the direction marshals multiple resources and steals: “Fellini, Godard, Richard Lester's Beatles films, late '60s hippie westerns...” admits Haynes.

Here, his free-associative approach shakes up notions of what both the biopic and the musical movie can be.

Greatest Hit: A deal-breaking moment, as Dylan goofs around with The Beatles in Hard Day's Night-style, the moptops reduced to giggling children in His Bobness's long, thin shadow.

24 Hour Party People

Michael Winterbottom's cocktail of fact, fancy and Bez-eyed gurning is a groovy doozy. What's it about? “Praxis,” reckons main motivator Tony Wilson.

“In doing it, you found out why you did it.” Over to Shaun Ryder: “Basically, we turned arsing around into an art form.”

Straddling a period in which Manchester choked up the contrasting geniuses of Joy Division (intense monochrome beauty) and Happy Mondays (drug-snaffling cartoon chaos), 24 Hour Party People plunges from the history-making heights to the pigeon-slaughtering lows with irreverence and smarts, exploring how marginal cultures ram-raided the mainstream and emerged scathed but “utterly elated”.

Never mind Sean Harris' poor, harassed-by-a-wasp Ian Curtis imitation. For a tale of how pop history is forged in the shortfall of thought before action, Winterbottom's mashed-up Icarus fable is magnificent in-flight and crash-down entertainment.

Greatest Hit: “Oi, you fucking wanker!” Shaun Ryder's methadone is spilt and consumed before he makes it to an expensive Barbados for recording. Once there, he sells anything – including his soul – to secure replacements.