I’m bending the rules a little here, and not only substituting TV for film, but turning the category on its head by doing Movies At The Opera rather than the other way round.

Francis Ford Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now (1979) uses Richard Wagner‘s “Ride of the Valkyries” to terrifying effect, depicting the brutality and horror of impersonal aerial warfare in the Vietnam War.

While Godfather III is definitely the weakest movie in the eponymous trilogy, partly due to a miscasting of Mary Corleone, I have nothing but praise for the wonderful, almost inspirational use of Cavalleria Rusticana in the finale of the movie.

The Talented Mr. Ripley x Eugene Onegin.

Wagner is used as incidental music or background to probably more films than any other operatic composer.

Some of you may remember the 1987 thriller Someone to Watch Over Me.

Interrupted Melody was the wonderful biographical film about the singer Marjorie Lawrence. I thought it was a wonderful blending of opera with a 1950s Movie.

Tristan transcriptions for violin, piano, and orchestra.

Jeanette MacDonald singing in her movies got the ball rolling for my lifelong interest in opera.

Greta Garbo as diva Rita Cavallini with an Italo-Swedish accent.

I love the use of the Liebestod at the end of Romeo + Juliet. It’s such a lush, romantic way to end the movie. The most Baz Lurhmann thing ever.

Impossible to pick any one film clip, but it’s hard to imagine a more evocative use of operatic music than Lars von Trier‘s Melancholia.

I think Babette’s Feast is a more or less perfect film and has been my favorite since the first time I saw it.

Anna Paquin cries at the opera to the Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffmann (Renée Fleming and Susan Graham)

One of the most striking uses of opera in television appears in HBO’s The Leftovers.

I’m cheating by choosing TV over a movie, but I can’t not pick the Hamlet episode of Gilligan’s Island.

It’s a total fraud, but I have always loved Maytime‘s “Csaritza” a fake “MGM” opera based on themes from Tchaikovsky‘s 5th symphony.

A brutal, chilling, gory final scene leading to a triumphant and goose bumps inducing final moments.

“Ebben, ne andro lontana” sung by Wihelmenia Wiggins Fernandez in Diva is a gorgeous woman in a beautiful dress singing a wonderful area in a legitimate concert venue. Great singing in my favorite French film.

Watching Fitzcarraldo at a very young age obviously turned me into a baby opera queen.

Max Ophuls, one of the greatest film directors, made masterpieces in French, German, English and Italian, as well as an amusing comedy in Dutch; he also clearly loved opera.

The terzettino from Così fan tutte makes an unexpected and unforgettable appearance in John Schlesinger‘s 1971 Sunday Bloody Sunday.

As opera and operetta “had a moment” in major Hollywood motion pictures starring the likes of Lawrence Tibbett, Jeannette MacDonald, and Nelson Eddy during the Great Depression, it made perfect sense that a canny showman like Mae West would want a piece of the action.

Visconti’s masterpiece and one of the great filmed sequences of opera.