Western European Music Invades On The Hustle, Anne Dudley opts for a vibrant and energetic French and Mediterranean style. While the score is built largely off of variations on a handful of themes and motifs, the short runtime keeps this […]
Nicholas Britell’s score for If Beale Street Could Talk conjures up a parallel world, where memories, hopes, and fears meld together, floating like some great overwhelming cloud. Much of the film lives in the memories of its main character, Tish. […]
Independent film is one of the great breeding grounds for new film composers. Consider Hans Zimmer, for example, who started his career scoring direct-to-video films before eventually securing eleven Academy Award nominations. While these films don’t offer the same monetary […]
Krzysztof Komeda is considered the forefather of European jazz. And yet, his most famous and enduring work is the haunting and discomforting score for Roman Polanski’s horror classic Rosemary’s Baby. The opening credits introduce Komeda’s single most well-known song – […]
Although ‘Avengers: Endgame’ may have captured the April box office, it’s the smaller independent movie scene that provides the month’s best scores. Two Composers with Two Scores Each Brian McOmber shows impressive variety with his scores for Hail Satan? and […]
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is a lonely, desolate landscape, one of the few places left in America that feels undisturbed by humanity’s touch. And yet, in Anatomy of a Murder it feels lively. Duke Ellington’s stylish score is the cause, making […]
Over the past decade Marvel has released 22 movies to create the “Infinity Saga” – the most ambitious overarching film story experiment. While it is impossible to analyze every score in a single article, ranking and briefly discussing the scores […]
Paul Rudd’s son had the same reaction to the announcement of Ant-Man as many of us unfamiliar with Marvel’s less popular characters: “I can’t wait to see how stupid that’ll be.” On paper, the sentiment isn’t wrong. Ant-Man controls an […]
Karel Zeman’s 1961 surrealist masterpiece The Fabulous Baron Munchausen is one of the more bizarre entries in film, with its fanciful story, kaleidoscopic colors, and animation/live action mix. The logical musical accompaniment would be something as equally odd and avantgarde. […]
Clint Mansell adds cacophonous noise and jarring sounds to beautiful, classical melodies that slowly degrade as Black Swan progresses. This degradation directly mirrors the protagonist’s own descent into insanity. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake is obviously thematically appropriate. However, it is too […]
Outside of Japan, Godzilla is somewhat of a joke. This is largely due to the historical relevance missing from every other country: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and, more recently, Fukushima. Shin Godzilla is perhaps the most realistic, agonizing version of this nuclear […]
The history and study of film music is largely a European and American centric one. Even today, most Western audiences are only familiar with composers from these two areas, largely ignoring the film music produced throughout the rest of the […]