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 […]
A nearly forgotten English classic, If…. is one of those genuinely provocative films that only the 60s and 70s could produce, satirizing school and religion, glorifying sex and drinking, and offering youth the dangerous idea of freedom. Marc Wilkinson’s hypnotic […]
The Proposition is a neo-western about the struggle for civilization. But, unlike most westerns, the conflict surrounding civilization is not between colonizer and colonized. Instead, it is between Australia’s criminal, lawless roots and encroaching British imperialism wishing to bring law […]
Despair rises up gradually, then suddenly, like the arms of a vice slowly closing in until, all at once, they crush everything in their grip. Lustmord’s score for First Reformed works in largely the same way. Much of the film […]
While Macbeth has undergone many iterations, Justin Kurzel’s 2015 film is the rare version that emphasizes the daunting nature of the Scottish landscape. Jed Kurzel’s score tries to bring this landscape to life and, in doing so, creates a particularly […]