Best Film Scores of 2018
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 […]
Logan’s Run – Jerry Goldsmith (1976)
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 […]
Aguirre, the Wrath of God – Popol Vuh (1972)
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 […]
The Third Man – Anton Karas (1949)
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 […]
A Field in England – Jim Williams (2013)
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 – Bernard Herrmann (1958)
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 […]
It Follows – Disasterpeace (2014)
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 […]
The Wicker Man – Paul Giovanni (1973)
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 […]
The Witch – Mark Korven (2015)
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 […]
Candyman – Philip Glass (1992)
In an uncharacteristic twist, one of the most famous modern composers agreed to make the soundtrack for a somewhat strange, B-tier horror movie. Philip Glass believed that Candyman would be an artsy, independent re-telling of Clive Barker’s original short story. Much […]
Dead Man – Neil Young (1995)
Most westerns contain many grandiose shots of great untamed landscapes – wide rivers, soaring mountains, sprawling valleys. These shots tend to be sweeping and slow-to-develop, allowing for an equally grandiose score to fill the void. This relationship puts the focus […]
Robocop – Basil Poledouris (1987)
I once wrote that the grimy urban hellscape of Beherit’s Electric Doom Synthesis would be a perfect soundtrack to Robocop. I was wrong. Basil Poledouris’s score perfectly portrays the downtrodden, darkened world of Robocop’s futuristic Detroit. But he also captures […]