As a lifeline within a lifetime, dancing never dies for Tom Hiddleston’s mild and multitudinous character

Dancing both awakens and disguises desire in Luca Guadagnino’s now classic coming-of-age film

In a theatre of public lies, dance becomes a vessel to speak out the truth 

Two takes on a cinematic dance scene that is simultaneously strange and mighty

Dance and rotoscope animation combine to stunning effect in the award-winning Netflix series

The dark side of dance takes centre stage in Olivia Wilde’s tale of beauty and control

The unnerving AI disco dance in Alex Garland’s movie provokes ideas about dance, autopilot and self-programming

The bump of lust and the grind of vacuity form ‘the great beauty’ that prefigures our times

The dreamspaces of dance and narrative cinema coincide in the unreal romance of Charlie Kaufman’s film

Blowing up the final scene of Antonioni’s notorious film to reveal the games of reality and representation

Accessories, prosthetics, props, extensions, constructions… Dorothy Allen-Pickard’s short film on the blur between materials and bodies

In the marvellous finale of Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, a dance, not a drink, comes to fill a lack in our lives. Here are two takes on the scene, one on the merging of actor, character and movement, the other a close-up of the dance itself.

Dance can slip through the nets of convention and identity – just like the films of David Lynch

Double trouble in the climactic dance scene of Jordan Peele’s 2019 horror Us

Dance brings a moment of presence within the waking dream of a world adrift

The BBC/Netflix crime drama Giri/Haji is another sign of mainstream media turning to contemporary dance for inspiration and innovation 

Animal courtship dances transformed into human choreography by Russell Maliphant, to advertise condoms

In Wes Anderson’s 2012 film, two runaway pre-teens dance on the empty beach of an unknown land called love

A mind-blowing, free-spirited dance film that is both scientifically exact and culturally far out 

A solitary dance becomes a rite of transformation in Todd Phillips’ 2019 Joker

Gaspar Noé’s Climax is thrilling, stylish and harrowing. Its story is prefigured in the extraordinary opening dance scene

T-step on the tarmac? An innovative school principal goes viral with his plan to get kids moving

Slick, stylish, violent… the Axe Gang in Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle know how to cut a figure on the dance floor – and off it…

A tango scene in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together invites our hearts into the spaces between separation and togetherness, fiction and reality

In place and out of time: dance anachronisms in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite (2018) are part of a fickle world 

The distorting mirror of dance reflects an intimate reality of adolescent vulnerability in Dogtooth (2009)

Andres Arochi’s short film uses dance to revisit Luis Barragán’s masterpiece of modernist architecture

Wedged between independence and genocide, a Cambodian dance scene shows that loving life is precious – and takes practice

Toil and trouble brews in a cavernous, covenous dance company

A pivotal scene in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina is wordless, its drama of love, transgression and death distilled in dance

An intoxicating scene from Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang embodies the headlong rush of youthful love and the mystery of its memory

Show, don’t tell! A teacher’s lesson on conformity from an embodied perspective

On the appeal and the achievement of the one-shot music video

Is that a raincoat or are you just glad to see me? Róisín O’Brien on the choreography of a murder

For the win! Anna Kaszuba on why artlessness triumphs in the dance scene from ‘Little Miss Sunshine’

Alexandra Gray on her first time watching Dirty Dancing – and why Baby’s first time on the dancefloor stays with her