Our series on films about theatre ends with Kermit staging a musical spectacular with the help of some famous friends

Twenty-five years before the hard-bitten Hollywood tale Sunset Boulevard, Swanson played a small-town waitress with a dream to act

Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning film about two married actors has intriguing parallels with the play they are performing

Part of the New German Cinema boom, Helma Sanders-Brahms’ 1975 film about two actors asks if theatre still has revolutionary potential

Actors roam Madrid, springing provocative performances on passersby, in Achero Mañas’s vibrant faux-documentary

The Italian auteur’s debut feature spoofs experimental theatre with its tale of a group of friends launching a heavy-handed Beckettian show

Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, standout song numbers, a clever fusion of stage and cinema … that’s entertainment!

Jane Birkin and Geraldine Chaplin star in the French director’s enthralling and perplexing drama about rehearsals for a one-off performance

The Kendal family of actors star in a story inspired by their travels around India, whose booming film industry upstages their theatrical troupe

In this stylish Japanese classic, a performer uses theatrical techniques to engineer the deaths of his enemies

A long-lost London playhouse and Rada’s headquarters feature in this 1950 caper starring a showstopping Marlene Dietrich

In this winning romcom, comedian Jessica Williams has a sparky energy that evokes theatre at its most immediate

Katharina Wyss’s film features a phenomenal debut from Loane Balthasar as an adolescent who uses theatre to both escape – and express – her demons

Ingmar Bergman’s movie unpacks, like no other, the intimate emotional processes of staging and seeing a play

Our series on films about theatre continues with a British comedy in which variety acts face an existential threat when TV steals their audience

Our series on films about theatre continues with a boozy, darkly funny comedy that captures the event’s pick’n’mix quality

Our series on films about the stage continues with the 1980 classic about a playhouse in occupied Paris, starring Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu

Continuing our series on the best films about theatre, a 200-year-old Japanese ghost story takes centre stage in a movie merging reality and fantasy

Gena Rowlands plays an actor frustrated with her character in a backstage drama that kicks off our series on the ways cinema depicts theatre