Boy and girl meet, fall in love, make promises they can’t keep. Cue the waterworks. Even if you’ve never seen Jacques Demy’s 1964 sung-through musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, starring a baby-faced Catherine Deneuve, you’re liable to have seen some of the work it’s influenced, like La La Land, rock opera oddity Annette, and Spike Jonze’s throwback music video for Björk’s “It’s Oh So Quiet.” Michel Legrand’s score, too, is rightfully iconic: Main theme “I Will Wait for You” – interpreted by everybody from Lena Horne to Jessye Norman to Itzhak Perlman – is a doleful masterpiece. A total sensation in its time, the romance won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was followed by another Demy-Deneuve-Legrand musical, 1967’s The Young Girls of Rochefort. – Kimberley Jones
