5 - Ray

4 - Coal Miner's Daughter

3 - The Pianist

2 - Walk the Line

1 - Amadeus

Quietly, she pleaded with her musician husband, "Rock me, Amadeus."

Musical biopics, even more than most biographies, can be a little too much of a tribute. We're not morons; we know these people have tons of problems. Plenty of them have used drugs or liquor, the majority of them have cheated on their wives (or husbands), and it's rarely as glamorous as it seems.

There are some very good musical biopics, going all the way back to The Glenn Miller Story and, to a degree, Yankee Doodle Dandy. But like a lot of genres, it has matured over time and audiences aren't as bowled over by revelations of hedonism and addiction as they might have been decades ago. What makes a great biopic is never the music or even the fame of the musician. It's always, always about the performances, and there are usually two great ones in each of the films.

We got a lot of nominations, and only a couple would you not strongly consider. I love Backbeat, for example, a movie about the pre-fame Beatles, but it's just not quite on the level of our top five. What's Love Got to Do with It and The Doors received some votes, and so did La Bamba, Bound for Glory, Great Balls of Fire, Sid and Nancy, Shine (which would have been sixth on our list...a tough omission), and The Sound of Music.

But we're comfortable with our Top Five Musical Biopics, and here's why:

Ray is one of two of the films on this list, and indeed, it's one of the few films in the genre, that survives with only one truly great performance. That's not to say Regina King didn't have her moments, but replace Jamie Foxx, and nothing else would have mattered. Some have knocked what Jamie Foxx did in this film as a mere impression, but impressions don't have power because they don't have character. They have traits and vocal similarities. Foxx's work was truly transcendent, and while you might also criticize the fact that Foxx doesn't sing in the movie, I'd ask you to find anyone who could sing like Ray Charles. Good luck with that.

Loretta Lynn was a strong, influential woman at a time that needed them, and her songs - "The Pill," "Rated X," and "You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man)", among others - were more than just catchy country hooks over the same three chords. She was a real artist, and for a female singer in Nashville in the 1960s and 1970s, that was almost unique. As Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter, Sissy Spacek is otherworldly. She's aided by Tommy Lee Jones portraying Lynn's husband, Mooney. The film itself creaks a little now, but the parts that hold up hold up beautifully.

The Pianist, completely without warning, made me cry like an infant. It's probably the most unexpected movie on this list, if you turn back the clock a few years. Roman Polanski hadn't made a great movie in a while, Adrien Brody was nobody's idea of an Oscar winner yet, and Władysław Szpilman was not exactly a well-known musician, particularly in the United States. But this movie is less about his music or his career and more about human survival. Szpilman lived through the Holocaust, which was not an easy thing to do. Just ask Polanski, who left his parents behind in a concentration camp, and ran for his life as an eight-year-old.

There is a moment of tenderness, I guess, between Szpilman (Brody) and a German soldier in The Pianist. And it's just heartbreaking. Brody was a surprise pick for Best Actor that year over some tough competition, but watch it again. It makes sense. And he carries that movie on his shoulders rather gracefully.

Speaking of moments of tenderness, the extremely populist Walk the Line has one of the more honest responses to a question you'll see between two movie characters. Having already experienced the cyclone that is John R. Cash, the star singer (Joaquin Phoenix) asks June Carter (Reese Witherspoon) if she'd like him to come into her hotel room after their performance in Las Vegas. She thinks about it briefly and says, "I don't know."

And while a lot of movies about "fated" lovers would say the three most important words between their characters are "I love you," for this film and these characters, it really was "I don't know." June was smart enough to know that Cash was danger in a black suit, but as she memorably wrote around this same time, her love burned, burned, burned like a ring of fire.

It would seem that making a movie as good as Walk the Line would be easy. Pick a tormented singer, pick his wife, play a few tunes, show some discord, and then end harmoniously. But this is a decidedly great piece of filmmaking on a lot of fronts. Director James Mangold kept his story from going too far. It could have continued on, to when Cash was a less vital but more popular artist, and it could have thrown old age make-up on Phoenix and Witherspoon to get the sympathy of June's passing, followed just months later by the end of Johnny Cash's days. But Mangold didn't do that. He told the story that led up to a very specific point. The rest is for someone else.

He chose his lead actors well. Phoenix doesn't look or sound like Johnny Cash, but he's cut from the same cloth. You can't have a happy-go-lucky guy with a great baritone play The Man in Black. You've got to be a Man in Black yourself. And both Phoenix and Witherspoon provide their best performances here, which might have surprised some people, particularly as far as Reese is concerned. So the success of Walk the Line is as much about June as it is Johnny, and it's as much about Reese Witherspoon as it is Joaquin Phoenix.

Oh, and the musical performances, primarily Witherspoon's - Hell, yeah. Their version of "Jackson" is better than the original.

Finally, there's Amadeus. I just don't know where to begin with this film. I always say it's in my top 20 films of all time, even though that's a list I've never compiled. But I know it's on there; it's too perfect to not be.

We're fairly certain that Antonio Salieri, a court composer during the time of Mozart, had nothing to do with the prodigy's death, although the idea was certainly nothing new by the time Peter Shaffer wrote his stageplay about it; the rumors had persisted for over 150 years that Salieri poisoned Mozart. One thing's for sure: It's a great foundation for a movie, and when you add Salieri as a man who only wanted to serve God through music watching an absolute heathen produce such brilliant work, the plot is pretty much set.

Of course, by the time Amadeus was turned into a film in the mid-1980s, it had enjoyed runs on London's West End and Broadway (with Sir Ian McKellen as the villain, if you want to daydream about that movie for a minute.) So it's not like Milos Forman had a lot of tinkering he needed to do. But still, the performance by Tom Hulce is resoundingly excellent, bested only by F. Murray Abraham's steely, serpentine Salieri.

And Abraham's convincing Best Actor win was something new; there had only been two or three, maybe four, villainous portrayals to ever win the award before him.

Beyond the acting, Forman has crafted a piece of art that never gets old, sounds flippin' fantastic, looks even better, and is as boiled down to good and evil as you could hope for. Looks like I'm going to watch it again this weekend...

Thanks for all your votes on this list, and keep your minds a-hummin' for the next list: With The Day the Earth Stood Still upon us December 12th, it's a perfect time to count down The Top Five Remakes. Sure, we hate 'em, but I'll be damned if they aren't profitable. Some of them are even really, really good. Now, this isn't TV adaptations. This is remakes of previously released films.

For your trouble, we've got some DVDs for you - Wall-E, Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, and more. So consider us your one-stop shop for holiday stocking stuffers.

Shoot us an e-mail with your votes for by Thursday, December 11th at 10pm Pacific to be in the running, and please, please, please include your mailing address so we know where to send your DVD should you win our random drawing.