Film

Funny Girl

Name: Funny Girl
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance
Released: 1968
Cast: Barbra Streisand, Omar Sharif, Kay Medford, Anne Francis, Walter Pidgeon

Funny Girl is the 1968 musical that made Barbra Streisand a movie star, adapting the Broadway hit about comedienne Fanny Brice's climb from tenement kid to Ziegfeld headliner, and her turbulent marriage to charming gambler Nick Arnstein. It's brassy, funny, and unashamedly big — Streisand belting and clowning her way through some of the great showstoppers. Best for anyone who wants old-fashioned spectacle with real heartbreak underneath.

TMDb rating

7.2

If you liked this

A Star Is Born1954

Judy Garland's aching, full-throttle performance is the blueprint for every showbiz rise-and-fall since — a masterclass in mixing comedy, tears, and torch songs, and the bar Streisand's Fanny had to clear.

But It's a long, heavy melodrama with a far sadder ending than Funny Girl, and the 1950s pacing can feel stately today.

The Way We Were1973no page yet

Streisand again, paired with Robert Redford, playing another woman whose conviction and drive outpace the charming man she loves — same ache, different decade, quieter register.

But It trades musical numbers for political drama, so if you came for the songs you'll be disappointed; the romance is more bittersweet than swoony.

Cabaret1972

Liza Minnelli's Sally Bowles is Fanny Brice's darker cousin — a performer chasing fame and love in Weimar Berlin, with showstoppers staged as commentary rather than escape.

But The Nazi rise looms over every scene, so the tone is far bleaker and more political than Funny Girl's warm nostalgia.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Great Ziegfeld1936

Ziegfeld appears as a character in Funny Girl; this earlier film tells his story directly, turning the same backstage world inside out from the producer's chair instead of the star's.

The lavish MGM biopic of Florenz Ziegfeld himself — the impresario who launches Fanny Brice's career in Funny Girl — showing the same Broadway world from the mogul's side, with even more delirious production numbers.

But It's nearly three hours of old-Hollywood pageantry with little of Fanny Brice's wit or intimacy; the focus is spectacle and ego, not one woman's inner life.

Gypsy1962

Another backstage musical about a woman clawing her way into showbusiness against the odds, built around one of Broadway's great belting scores and a monstrous, magnetic mother.

But Rosalind Russell's stage mother dominates so completely that the ostensible heroine can feel like an afterthought.

Chicago2002

Fosse-inspired razzle-dazzle about women using performance and scandal to become stars, sharing Funny Girl's appetite for wit and spectacle and a heroine who refuses to disappear quietly.

But The fragmented, fantasy-sequence editing is a big departure from Funny Girl's straightforward staging, and the humour is much more cynical.

All That Jazz1979

Bob Fosse's self-autopsy of a director-choreographer burning himself out for the show, carrying the same obsessive love of performance but turned inward and far darker.

But It's genuinely upsetting in places, more about mortality than romance, and its surreal structure asks a lot of patience.

Yentl1983

Streisand directing and starring in her own passion project — another story of a Jewish woman refusing the life she's handed, wrapped in her own soaring songbook.

But It's slower and more earnest than Funny Girl, and the premise — cross-dressing to study Torah — can feel quaint or overlong to some.

La La Land2016

A modern musical asking the same question Funny Girl asks — can ambition and love survive in the same relationship — dressed in jazz, Los Angeles light, and an original score.

But It's more melancholy and open-ended than Funny Girl's brassy triumph, and its nostalgia for old Hollywood can feel a little too knowing.

Hello, Dolly!1969

Streisand's other 1969 musical, made almost back-to-back with Funny Girl — bigger, brasher, and full of the same comic timing and vocal firepower, if you want more of exactly that.

But The story is thinner and the tone broader and more farcical; it's spectacle over substance, without Funny Girl's emotional undertow.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work2010no page yet

Rivers is Fanny Brice's real-life descendant — another Jewish woman comic who turned rejection into performance and never stopped needing the audience's love, filmed at an age Brice never reached.

A ferociously honest documentary portrait of a Jewish comedian who built and rebuilt a career on pure nerve, decades after Fanny Brice did the same — funny, sad, and completely unguarded about the cost.

But There's no romance and no music, just a real woman in her seventies still fighting for stage time, which can feel far from Funny Girl's glamour.

Black Swan2010

Both are about a woman consumed by the role that makes her a star; Funny Girl plays it as triumphant comedy, Black Swan as nightmare — the same question, opposite answer.

Take Funny Girl's engine — a woman's identity fused to her performance, a partner who can't handle what she becomes — and run it through psychological horror instead of comedy.

But It's genuinely disturbing, with body horror and a nihilistic take on what ambition does to a person; there's no warmth here to land on.