Sightlines · a viewing thread

Burning to Be the Best

Watch these together for the shared fever of ambition — musicians, dancers and one table-tennis obsessive driving themselves past exhaustion toward a greatness that keeps costing more.

Mostly beloved crowd-pleasers and modern canon that go down easy and anchor on the essential Whiplash; only Black Swan asks for a stronger stomach, with All That Jazz the film-school classic and Blue Giant the pleasant anime deep cut.

• Whiplash (2014)
• La La Land (2016)
• Black Swan (2010)
• All That Jazz (1979)
• tick, tick... BOOM! (2021)
• Marty Supreme (2025)
• Blue Giant (2023)
• Shine (1996) — The overlooked prodigy-at-the-piano film that rhymes hardest with Whiplash — if the mentor-drives-you-past-your-limit fever landed there, this is the under-seen one to finally pull down, where the pushing comes from a father and the cost is the boy's own mind.
• Babylon (2022) — Chazelle's own maximalist follow-up to Whiplash and La La Land, the forgotten one on your list — the same burning ambition to make it in showbiz, only sprawled across a whole industry and shot through with the wreckage that greatness leaves behind.
• Rocketman (2019) — If tick, tick... BOOM! landed, this is the under-seen musician-biopic to queue next — a piano prodigy driving himself from the Royal Academy to global superstardom, greatness costing more with every encore.
• Challengers (2024) — If Marty Supreme's table-tennis fever and Black Swan's rivalry landed, this is the recent one to pull down next — a tennis triangle where a broken prodigy pours her thwarted greatness into a champion, and every match is somebody burning to be the best.