300,000 soldiers trapped on the shores of Dunkirk. A rescue fleet comes from the north; Nazis from everywhere else. The soldiers know this. They also know that they have no say in whether they live or die. They can only […]
Sometimes things are not what they seem. Take Demolition Man. At first glance it’s the dumb, brutishishness you’d expect from a 1993 action movie starring Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes. But it’s also an oddball comedy and social critique and […]
Bone Tomahawk quickly rose to notoriety due to the overwhelmingly graphic, brutal nature of one particular scene. But, despite the fame of this scene, it’s not representative of the movie. Violence is rare and ends quickly. Instead, the majority of […]
In 2011, Cliff Martinez helped popularize the 80s synth and electropop revivalist subgenres through his work on Drive. While this remains his most popular work, Only God Forgives is perhaps his strongest score to date. It fuses elements from Drive, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]