10. “Phantom Thread” (2017)
Jonny Greenwood has enjoyed quite the ongoing collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson, resulting in the Bela Bartok-esque compositions of “The Master” and the haunted surf-guitar atmospherics of “Inherent Vice.” Greenwood’s score for “Phantom Thread” is both consistent with the particulars of their creative relationship, and also a fascinating deviation from what they normally do. On its surface, “Phantom Thread” looks like one of PTA’s most conventional movies: it’s a torrid romantic melodrama that unfolds within a rarefied period milieu. However, as anyone who has seen the film knows, this is a reductive take, when the film is actually as daunting, unclassifiable, and flat-out bizarre as anything Anderson has ever made. To that end, the music in “Phantom Thread” sounds consciously safe on its surface, until you peel back its many layers to reveal the decidedly out-there foundations on which the compositions have been constructed. “Boletus Felleus,” for instance, almost sounds like modern ambient music, and you could almost be forgiven for mistaking “Alma” for a particularly low-key Radiohead B-side. There’s nothing here as fevered as the score for “The Master,” and the music “Phantom Thread” is ultimately a more restrained collection than anything to be found in Greenwood’s work on “Inherent Vice.” That said, this is a score that seeps its way into your brain, with restful melodies that take on the quality of dreamlike lullabies. Like the film itself, the music in “Phantom Thread” is simultaneously classical and modern: a deliberate clash of tonalities that, somehow, always feels as seamlessly engineered as a Reynolds Woodcock dress. – NL
9. “The Social Network” (2010)
David Fincher probably knew he was going to have to make his version of the story of Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook feel more fast-paced than it is: after all, “The Social Network” is fundamentally the story of a bunch of brainy Harvard kids who spend much of their time tittering away on their laptops. How do you make that sort of stuff exciting – how do you make it cinematic? Simple: you hire Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to score the film, turning what could have otherwise been a dry procedural drama into a certified American classic that moves at breakneck speed (if there’s a way to spruce up screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s abundance of tech-bro verbiage, try employing a discordant industrial remix of “In The Hall of the Mountain King” as a countermeasure). The film is also noteworthy for being Reznor and Ross’s first collaboration with the great director. It’s also, arguably, their best – which is saying a lot when you consider that the soundtracks for both “Gone Girl” and “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” are nothing to sneeze at. Forbidding electronic scores weren’t all the rage in the early 2010’s, so let’s give Mr. Fincher credit where credit is due for being ahead of the curve here. This is music that is both threatening in its timber and locomotive in its sheer pace – not an easy thing to pull off. “In Motion” is every bit as motile as its title suggests, while “Hand Covers Bruise,” which plays over the movie’s opening credits, casts the early scenes in Fincher’s preferred mood of slow-burning dread. Is it really a small wonder that Reznor and Ross became two of Hollywood’s most in-demand film composers after this movie? – NL
8. “Baby Driver” (2017)
“Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World,” which featured songs from Beck, The Black Lips, The Rolling Stones, Broken Social Scene, and the great fictional band Sex Bob-Omb, proved that Edgar Wright knew how to put together a great soundtrack. With his great jukebox-musical crime flick “Baby Driver,” the director did his fans one better: he conceived an entire film around a soundtrack, to the degree that if one song in the movie were out of place, the whole thing would come toppling down like a house of cards. “Baby Driver” is flush with instant-classic movie-music moments: a pulse-pounding opening heist set to the rollicking rock n’ roll sounds of “Bellbottoms” by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, a warehouse shoot-out that is transformed into a Looney Tunes-inspired set piece via the sounds of “Tequila,” and a vehicular showdown lent a sense of cartoon grandiosity through the swaggering notes of Queen’s “Brighton Rock.” Hell, Wright even manages to use Simon and Garfunkel’s “Baby Driver” – the song that inspired the name of this movie – over the movie’s unexpectedly rueful final frames. Somehow, it doesn’t sound corny in the slightest. Wright is in a class of his own when it comes to directing action (see: the aliens-vs.-Brits pub brawls of “The World’s End”) and he clearly understands how the perfect piece of music can enhance the fabric of an otherwise familiar scene. “Baby Driver,” unsurprisingly, is filled with wonderful little moments like this. Wright is a master playlist curator in his own right (his yearly playlists are a gift that keeps giving), and “Baby Driver” is a playful, idiosyncratic ode to one quiet kid’s private soundtrack. – NL
7. “Drive” (2011)
Employing the lethal minimalist metronome of “Tick of the Clock” by the Chromatics is a hell of a way to open a movie. The song sounds like the heartbeat of a restless urban hellscape, pulsating with anxiety and a clipped, clinical sense of dread. Nicolas Winding Refn knows this, and one of the reasons that his hyperviolent, neon-drenched breakout thriller “Drive” isn’t your run-of-the-mill revenge flick is its top-tier soundtrack. Refn’s work with regular collaborator Cliff Martinez is somehow both ethereal and foreboding: like the angelic synths of “Blade Runner”-era Vangelis bent into a new, alluringly rotten shape. The songs, meanwhile, are sublime. “Under Your Spell” by Desire is a druggy, slow-motion banger that repeats its central zombie-like refrain (“you keep me under your spell”) until it’s permanently lodged in your head. Elsewhere, “Nightcall” by Kavinsky sounds like chopped-and-screwed Kraftwerk with the tremendous, galumphing backdrop of “Sorcerer”-era Tangerine Dream. The real winner, though, is “A Real Hero,” a number by French electro outfit College and Canadian synth-poppers Electric Youth that plays during two key scenes in the film. This ebullient nugget of blissed-out romantic synthwave is essentially “Drive” in a nutshell: exultant and absurd, magnificent and cheesy, ironic yet sincere, and totally and completely original. – NL
6. “Interstellar” (2014)
There are few composers who know how to build and master a sense of explosive theatricality without spilling over into cacophonous noise – and one of those is Hans Zimmer. But Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” is defined by its secret layers: the cracks in a bookcase, the loophole in an equation, the slither of thought that helps you remember what you’d been looking for for years. Zimmer captures this by sustaining gentle, high notes – they could be strings as much as distorted keys – that sound as hopeful as they do melancholic, and layering them over sounds of waves and machinery, of the world panicking while the mission keeps on going. It’s a beast of a soundtrack, clocking in at 1h36 across 24 tracks. They all build, even when you think Zimmer has reached the apex he delivers and sustains a note another octave higher – a string tugging on your own diaphragm, making you feel that little bit taller. The organ in “Where We’re Going,” interrupted by those two-beat high notes performed in code against silence, is one of the most affecting sounds of this decade. Each track holds an entire world of personal, specific memory, but amps up the stakes – just waiting for each and every viewer’s mind to slowly expand in stunning moments of realisation, in the face (and ears?) of such world-altering beauty. –EK
5.“If Beale Street Could Talk” (2018)
The first notes we hear in “If Beale Street Could Talk” are swooning, aching, seemingly arising from within the very depths of the human heart itself. It’s a number titled “Eden (Harlem),” orchestrated by the great film composer Nicholas Britell (who also did the music for “Vice” and this year’s “The King”). The music itself conjures waves of passion and despondency: its richness is so abundant that it makes other film scores seem tin-eared. Alas, “Eden (Harlem)” just the beginning of one of the great modern scores to any film of the last ten years. Naturally, it would make sense for “Beale Street” director Barry Jenkins to want to reunite with Britell, after he lent his poetic ear to “Moonlight,” where Jenkins made the sounds of Goodie Mob and chopped-and-screwed Jidenna somehow sound poignant. The music in “If Beale Street Could Talk” is certainly consistent with the period, and yet its power feels timeless, perennial, in line with the enduring bond of the unwavering lovers who stand at the core of Jenkins’ humane masterpiece. “Agape” buries jazzy flourishes deep in the mix beneath a low tide of sonic languor, while the somber keys of “Jezebel” are somehow both classical and modern. Britell is one of our most skilled musical minds when it comes to rallying a sense of cinematic grandeur, and he and Jenkins make a fine team. No word as to whether or not Britell will score either Jenkins’ upcoming Underground Railroad project or his Alvin Ailey biopic, but we, for one, are keeping our fingers crossed. – NL
4. “First Man” (2018)
It was a wonder how Justin Hurwitz would follow up his Oscar-winning score on “La La Land” in a movie about the notoriously taciturn first man to go to the moon. But Damien Chazelle has always been a romantic, and has always worked closely with Hurwitz to achieve his vision sonically too. So what did he do? Hurwitz dug out the theremin. This strange instrument, that doesn’t need to be touched to be played, emits an otherworldly sound – like some kind of alien having an angelic hum to itself. The theremin plays a major part in Hurwitz’s work here, namely on “Quarantine” where it gently dances through the theme, balancing alongside a lone harp. The score does go darker, raising adrenaline as the mission gets closer to d-day – in interludes like “Spin” you can tell Hurwitz had fun playing around with NASA sound effects, and figured out the conventional glossy movie sounds of strings later. But what sets this apart from other grandiose themes for space movies is that it’s not all about the overwhelming, linear rush of fear and power that comes with liftoff. The pivotal moment in “First Man” is indeed given music – but it’s only one that the director of the revolutionary kind of contemporary musical could have okayed. It’s a waltz. There’s no one to dance, but that doesn’t mean Hurwitz won’t keep on doing so himself. – EK
3. “Carol” (2015)
To tell the story of Carol Aaird and Therese Belivet, a forbidden sapphic romance in 1950s New York, the sounds of the score had to immediately puncture the heart. There’s urgency to Carter Burwell’s work as a composer, thrusting the listener into a heavy state of infatuation, with immensely patient and passionate classical arrangements. There are also five additional tracks, swinging, crooning jazz numbers that emphasise the exciting nature of falling in love with one person while the rest of the world keeps spinning regardless. But it’s Burwell’s aching themes that form the emotional makeup of “Carol.” “Opening” makes all-time perfect use of the switches between major and minor chords, every minor note feeling like a jab straight to the gut. What lingers above all else, though, is the harp. A tinkle of three notes, punctuating the buoyant strings that permanently sound as if on a journey somewhere, a mission to run away from what’s wrong into the arms of what’s meant to be. The harp keeps coming back, peppering a magical sense of yearning into “Over There” against the sad strings too. “The End” offers a fittingly fatalistic farewell – hear the deafening silences between the piano keys, the and flute that sounds like it’s weeping. It’s with music like this that the story of two people spirals out and becomes tangled with every viewer’s own memories of love, both cherished and lost. It’s a singular feeling, one so special to bottle and replay over and over once reached. – EK
2. “A Star Is Born” (2018)
Who knew Bradley Cooper had it in him? Before this, he was the star of “The Hangover,” “American Sniper,” and “Burnt.” But from the opening strum of a moody guitar, it’s clear that “A Star Is Born” not only showcases Lady Gaga the actress – two stars come to light here, and Cooper the musician is one of them. He plays Jackson Maine, the swaggering, swigging rockstar with deep pain in his heart. He wears a hat onstage and seldom makes eye contact with his seas of fans, delivering traditionally masculine rock ballads in register a whole octave lower than his usual voice. Jackson speaks of “three chords and the truth,” and it’s with this simple philosophy that Cooper writes most of his songs. “Music To My Eyes,” “Alibi,” and “Maybe It’s Time” standout as crooning all-timers for Jackson to perform solo. But then he also writes all of Ally’s songs – “Always Remember Us This Way” has the widespread appeal of any good piano-led track in the charts, while “Look What I Found” has more groove to it. It’s a shame that songs in the latter half of the film seem to have a somewhat derogatory view of pop music, with “Why Did You Do That?” and “Before I Cry” in particular – but it all melts away by the time Gaga delivers the heartstopping “I’ll Never Love Again”. The show, of course, categorically belongs to “Shallow” – the Oscar-winning belter that also enlisted the help of Mark Ronson to get it off the ground. The lyrics are familiar, but the notes Gaga hits are nothing short of miraculous. Impossible to only play once. – EK
1. “Inside Llewyn Davis” (2013)
One of the major requirements for the star of Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Inside Llewyn Davis” was that whoever played the lead role had to know how to carry a tune. And boy, does Oscar Isaac know how to carry a tune. “Inside Llewyn Davis” opens with Isaac’s ghostly rendition of Dave Van Ronk’s “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me.” It’s a thing of dark beauty, this version of the song, and it hinges the movie on an essential truth: Llewyn Davis is a good musician. He’s just a guy who can’t allow himself to be happy. Of course, the Coens have always had a pair of fine ears. Their second collaboration with T-Bone Burnett (after “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” which reveled in roots music and old-timey bluegrass) is a boisterous celebration of mid-century American folk, tinged with longing, sadness, and a deep and unwavering sense of tradition. “Please Mr. Kennedy” would be an out-there countryl anthem for the ages even if it didn’t contain Adam Driver’s strange, harmonic warbling. “The Death of Queen Jane,” an English ballad sung by Llewyn at a crucial point in the narrative, is a beacon of tender majesty amidst all the snowy self-loathing. The movie also makes terrific use of the gritty Bob Dylan ditty “Farewell,” which plays over the end credits, almost as a sort of premonition to any viewer who makes the mistake of identifying with Llewyn a little too much. – NL
