2019’s Golden Globe and BAFTA winners for Best Music/Original Score failed to make the final cut for the 91st Academy Awards, giving five unproven scores the chance at glory. While I may not be an awards-season aficionado, the least I […]
BlacKkKlansman by Terence Blanchard If Beale Street Could Talk by Nicholas Britell Isle of Dogs by Alexandre Desplat Mary Poppins Returns by Marc Shaiman A Star is Born by Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, and Lukas Nelson ANALYSIS This year’s BAFTA […]
Black Panther by Ludwig Göransson First Man by Justin Hurwitz Isle of Dogs by Alexandre Desplat Mary Poppins Returns by Marc Shaiman A Quiet Place by Marco Beltrami ANALYSIS The 2019 Golden Globes air tonight. As with many larger awards […]
In 2018 I listened to around 80 film scores and ranked my favorites (as well as a few honorable mentions that straddled the top-10 but didn’t quite make the cut). Many of these have appeared on other year-end lists, but […]
Post-apocalyptic and dystopian films have surged in popularity in the past decade. Much like these recent films, Logan’s Run focuses on the conflict between an intolerable home and some rumored promise land. Jerry Goldsmith highlights these two distinct locations by […]
Enter the New World. The conquistadors believed it was God-given, filled with cites of gold and fountains of youth, where every man was free and rich and a king of his own. But in Aguirre, the Wrath of God, this […]
Jazz is the stereotypical music of film noir. Soft piano and crooning sax, the perfect moody complement to those scenes of smoke-filled bar; desolate, rain-soaked streets; the honking of a ’38 Packard and the holstering of a ’38 special. The […]
In the 17th century, a group of soldiers and their academic hostage eat psychedelic mushrooms in A Field in England. In so doing, they’re convinced that they’ve uncovered the powers of divination, becoming enspelled in the process. Jim Williams uses […]
Vertigo: the sensation of a loss of stability; a spinning, destabilizing unease, that you and the world around are careening into chaos and you can do nothing but watch, transfixed. In a high stakes moment, vertigo strikes veteran detective Johnny […]
Pick any year from the 2010s and you’ll find a dozen (or more) synth/electronic driven film scores. These scores tend to feel familiar and rely on the same tropes because they share the same influences. Disasterpeace’s It Follows takes these […]
Paul Giovanni uses English folk music to reflect the neo-paganist worldview of the The Wicker Man’s isolated islanders. Many of these songs are upbeat drinking ballads or slower love songs. In any other context, they would be the soundtrack to […]
A common complaint about film and TV scores is their use of tone over melody (a complaint perhaps most famously made by Jason Segel’s composer character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall). Mark Korven completely ignored this complaint for his score of […]