I feel a song coming on . . .

Whatever we think of poor old Rocky Balboa shuffling out for another crack at heavyweight boxing glory, you would need to have a heart of stone not to enjoy the classic montage scene from the original 1976 movie, in which the Italian Stallion, doing his roadwork, runs euphorically up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and raises his fists in triumph to the pounding theme tune, Gonna Fly Now. In the new movie, he does it with his dog Punchy on a leash, and the closing credits show a good-natured YouTube-style collection of ordinary folk of all ages cheerfully doing their own homage-run up the steps.

That scene is a reminder of how a musical moment can provide a distinctive dramatic and emotional language that, for a minute or two, transcends everything else. Great cinema-music moments need not be over a montage, or a straightforward sugar-rush like the Rocky sequence. They need not necessarily be songs from a musical, or characters who happen to be singing songs. What they do need to do is deliver compressed drama straight into the vein. So here, entirely subjectively, are my top 10 Rocky Steps moments.

Casablanca

The singing of La Marseillaise Enraged by the German soldiers in Rick's cafe singing their boorish and triumphalist beer-hall songs, Victor Laszlo marches up to the bandstand and demands that they play the Marseillaise. Rick coolly nods his assent, and Laszlo leads a defiant chorus of the French anthem that electrifies everyone present. There is a close-up of Madeleine Le Beau, playing the jilted Yvonne, singing angrily, passionately, through floods of tears; just a few minutes before we had seen her flirting with les boches because nothing mattered any more. It is her redemption and, for a glorious moment, she has a kind of Mary Magdalene aura. I can never hear the Casablanca Marseillaise - in fact I can never even think about it - without goosebumps.

The James Bond theme

Considering that the James Bond movies are not musicals, they have a history of extraordinarily compelling and distinctive tunes. But it is the James Bond theme - composed by Monty Norman, and later orchestrated by John Barry - that has the most voltage; it's the one that begins every Bond film (though is sadly kept for the end of the new Casino Royale). More than any other melody, it conveys tension, pleasure and excitement in miraculously condensed form.

Brief Encounter

Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto

Profoundly unhappy and confused about her situation, Laura (Celia Johnson) finds a soundtrack to her concealed love life in the extravagantly passionate music of Rachmaninov, to which she listens on a record player that is part of the heavy-set furniture in her home. In listening to the music, she is feeding an addiction: an addiction to romance that is inimical to the quiet English life she appears to be leading. Gripping.

Singin' in the Rain

All I Do Is Dream of You

This number is my favourite moment from the great musical because the narrative advances in the course of the song. Kathy, played by Debbie Reynolds, has given Don (Gene Kelly) a ride to a party, and they get into an argument when she, a stage actress, derides the shallow world of the movies. Then, at the party, Don is hugely amused to see Kathy jump out of a cake and sing the song. He grins and taunts her; she is about to cry with humiliation. Something about her vulnerability, her prettiness, her gutsy determination to keep on singin' awakens his gallantry and, by the end of it, Don is in love with Kathy.

2001: A Space Odyssey

The Blue Danube

A sublime but essentially playful and even comic musical sequence. It's a gentle waltz in space, showing the perfectly synchonised, graceful movement of the planets and the spacecraft that travels between them. Kubrick cuts between these awe-inspiring masses and the scenes within the flight deck and the passenger cabin. The music wafts you along, literally lighter than air in this zero-gravity environment, at once offsetting and accentuating the exhilarating strangeness of everything on screen.

The Jazz Singer

Toot Toot Tootsie

The great primal scene of music in the cinema. This 1927 film, starring Al Jolson, was the first full-length feature film with spoken dialogue sequences. Al Jolson sings a song called Dirty Hands, Dirty Face, all about being a dad, and then electrifies the audience by actually speaking. He says: "Wait a minute, I tell ya, you ain't heard nothin' - you wanna hear Toot Toot Tootsie?" After some more patter, he sings his classic song, which is extraordinary because it is linked to dialogue and built into drama; the music is part of the structure of cinema for the first time. Another scalp-tingler.

The Jaws theme

Probably my most obvious choice, endlessly quoted and parodied, so that it is almost impossible to recover the extraordinary impact the music originally had. In a pre-digital age, Steven Spielberg needed a shark that was not going to look ridiculous; John Willliams' theme, with its menacingly brutal, spondaic rhythm, was part of not just the soundtrack but also the art direction and the production design. It made you believe you had seen a shark when you hadn't.

Paris, Texas

Ry Cooder's bottle-guitar theme

A remarkable motif which introduced us to the work of Ry Cooder. The music meshes brilliantly with the image of the lonely desert and scrub, and Harry Dean Stanton's gaunt face. His story is dramatised by the twanging guitar figure: piercing, plangent, a cry of pain in its higher register and one of grim, almost animal determination in the lower range. It denotes authentic Americana like nothing else, despite the European ironies of the title.

Mean Streets

Jumpin' Jack Flash

In this, and in Raging Bull and GoodFellas, Scorsese showed a mastery of slow-motion or stylised introductory sequences in bars. Here, the Rolling Stones classic acts as a brash fanfare for De Niro's entrance into the bar, into the film and into American cinema history.

Withnail and I

Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Chile

Withnail's final drunken, crazed, absurdly self-destructive drive back from the country, while being pursued by the police, is brilliantly accompanied by Hendrix. It's a very funny moment in a very funny film, and yet the deadly serious music is somehow appropriate: this is the music Withnail, perhaps like all drink-drivers, hears inside his head. It's the theme for a rebel, a super-cool outsider, defying the law and the forces of oppression. What we see, objectively, is quite different.

· What musical moment would make your top 10? Tell us at blogs.guardian.co.uk/arts