Film

The Tales of Hoffmann

Name: The Tales of Hoffmann
Genre: Music, Fantasy, Drama
Released: 1951
Cast: Moira Shearer, Ludmilla Tchérina, Pamela Brown, Léonide Massine, Ann Ayars

A dazzling opera film where a poet recounts three doomed loves—a mechanical doll, a seductive courtesan, a dying composer's daughter—told through Offenbach's shimmering score. It's a feast for the eyes: impossible sets, dancers en pointe, colours that seem to exist only in dreams. For anyone who's ever wanted proof that cinema and dance and music can fuse into something transcendent.

TMDb rating

3.6

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love opera-sized fantasy where sung arias, ballet and rich colour carry the emotion, and you don't mind a dreamlike, theatrical logic that trusts the stage.

Skip it if you find sung opera hard going, since much of the drama arrives through singing, and a story told in three episodes can feel episodic and slow to build.

What it asks of you: Over two hours of heightened, painterly staging, where patience with stylised artifice counts for more than plot momentum, and the mood stays dreamy throughout.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Black Swan2010

A psychologically fractured ballet dancer, filmed with the same obsessive visual intensity and supernatural creeping dread. Natalie Portman's performance is raw where *Hoffmann* is ethereal, but both chase the same fever dream of art consuming the artist.

But It's brutal and modern and concerned with mental illness rather than fantasy. If you want more Technicolor magic and less bodily horror, this goes the opposite direction.

The Phantom of the Opera1925

Silent, gothic, operatic—Lon Chaney in the role that defined the archetype. It has the same doomed-love-through-music DNA, and the production design is genuinely haunting. A clear ancestral connection.

But It's silent and from the 1920s, which means patience with different storytelling rhythms. The pacing won't move you like Hoffmann's music does.

La La Land2016

Two artists in love, filmmaking that puts music and movement at the centre, and a willingness to be unabashedly romantic and heartbreaking. It's a modern musical that understands why the form matters.

But It's contemporary Los Angeles, not a Romantic fantasy. If you specifically want more impossible sets and otherworldly atmosphere, this is earthbound by design.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from The Tales of Hoffmann

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Turning Point1977

Both films use dance and performance as the language of passion and tragedy; both ask whether love and art can coexist, and both answer with quiet heartbreak.

Two former ballet dancers—one who quit, one who stayed—face each other across decades of sacrifice and compromise. It's about the same question Hoffmann circles: what does art demand, and what are you willing to give it? Danced and acted with devastating clarity.

But It's a character drama in a modern setting, not a fantasy. If you want visual spectacle and impossible worlds, this is grounded and sometimes unglamorous.

Singin' in the Rain1952

Pure joy in motion: Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor dancing with such invention and charm that you forget cinema has rules. It proves musicals can be made for the camera rather than adapted from stages.

But It's comedic and light where Hoffmann is melancholic and tragic. The tone is almost opposite—you're getting the technique without the ache.

The Red Shoes1948

Another Powell and Pressburger masterpiece about art and obsession, with a 15-minute ballet sequence that was made for Technicolor. Moira Shearer dances and acts; the film treats ballet as cinema, not theatre.

But It's about a dancer caught between love and art, which means the romance is secondary. Some find it slow; the final act divides people on whether it earns its darkness.

Suspiria1977

A horror film with the visual and sonic ambition of an opera—it treats a ballet school as a hall of nightmares, uses colour and Goblin's score as pure narrative language. Deeply strange and deeply committed.

But It's visceral and violent in ways Hoffmann never is. The plot is secondary to mood and image; some find it frustratingly opaque.

Ondine2010

A water nymph, a mortal, a love that cannot last—directed by Blake Russell with painterly discipline and real ballet dancers. It's a fairy tale told with operatic grace and genuine pathos.

But Less widely known and less accessible than the others. It requires patience with a deliberately paced, mythic register that some will find slow.

Anna Karenina2012

Joe Wright's adaptation treats Tolstoy like an opera, staging scenes on and around a theatre set. The visual language is deliberately artificial, musical, heightened—it's cinema reaching for operatic intensity.

But It's intellectually ambitious in a way that can feel mannered. Some viewers find the theatricality annoying rather than enhancing.

The 39 Steps1935

Hitchcock's most musical thriller: it moves like a song, builds suspense through rhythm rather than violence, and finds romance in the spaces between danger. A masterclass in cinematic flow.

But It's a spy thriller, not a fantasy or romance. The emotional register is lighter and the stakes are external rather than internal.

Mulholland Drive2001

Both films use visual impossibility and performance (literal and psychological) to explore how we love, lose, and construct ourselves through fantasy. Both suggest that reality and dream are not safely separated.

Two women, Hollywood, dreams folding into nightmares, identity dissolving. Lynch films it like a fever dream where the rules of narrative collapse—blue boxes, directors within scenes, a woman who might be two women. Visually surreal in a way that reaches for Hoffmann's register.

But It's abstract and deliberately difficult. You won't leave with clarity; you'll leave with questions and images that linger in ways that can feel frustrating rather than cathartic.