6. “Ema”
During one of the few funny scenes in Pablo Larraín’s scorching “Ema,” a jealous, emotionally maladjusted dance choreographer played by Gael Garcia Bernal disparagingly regards reggaeton as “prison music.” In spite of this dismissal, “Ema” is a film that has a profound respect for music as an art form: dance, bodies in motion, and melody as an ethos. In that regard, Nicolas Jaar’s disorienting soundscapes qualify as some of the most innovative original film music since… well, since Larraín solicited “Under The Skin” genius Mica Levi to score his unconventional biopic, “Jackie.” The music in “Ema” is simultaneously disorderly and immaculately arranged, throbbing with desire and a sense of repressed rage that mirrors the anguish of the toxic couple who exist at the movie’s center (don’t even get us started on the ground-shaking impact of “E$tado Unido” by REAL and Stephanie Janaina, a dancefloor anthem that would sound colossal in a club and sounds like a kind of rhythmic earthquake here). “Ema” is a riot of sound, color, and movement with enough energy to power a small city, and while the film may pulsate with the alien sounds of reggaeton, electro, and house music, but Larraín’s willingness to say “fuck expectations” qualifies his film as pure punk rock. – NL
5. “Tenet”
Even viewers who had no idea what the hell was going on in “Tenet” can admit that the movie’s score – a series of shimmering, explosive, rattle-the-ground-beneath-your-feet alien arpeggios composed by “Black Panther” mastermind Ludwig Göransson – keeps things moving at such a breakneck pace that the more headache-inducing elements of Christopher Nolan’s intensely convoluted plot ultimately recede into the background of one’s memory. Here, Nolan is working without cherished longtime collaborator Hans Zimmer, but the change-up only matters so much: Nolan tends to favor metronomic rhythms that emphasize the urgency of a clock running down the seconds, and “Tenet” finds thrillingly blockbuster-sized new outlets for the director’s preferred sonic register. “Freeport” is sleek and gorgeous, building to an almost unbelievably rattling crescendo, while “Trucks In Place” sounds like the war cry of armies from the distant future, and the score’s most memorable cut, “Posterity,” which unfolds (*spoiler*) during the film’s climactic raid on one of the Soviet Union’s closed cities, unfolds like the demented speed-freak cousin of Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Connie” (from the avant-garde composer’s score for “Good Time”), but with the velocity cranked up a hundredfold. This is music that’s built to overwhelm your senses, and while some brave souls were able to catch “Tenet” in theaters, where the film and its much-discussed sound mix is no doubt most effective, the truth is that Göransson’s score sounds similarly earth-shaking when played on home speakers. – NL
4. “Nomadland”
The score in a film like Chloe Zhao’s “Nomadland” must perform a tricky balancing act: if the music itself too overtly melodramatic, it runs the risk of manipulating the viewer; however, if it’s not present enough, then why bother with a score at all? Alas, like everything else in Zhao’s gloriously heartrending look at the promise of the open road and the difficulty of starting over in middle age, Ludovico Einaudi’s remarkable arrangements for “Nomadland” are just right. Einaudi is a formidable musical mind with a background that speaks for itself: apart from his achievements in the world of classical composition and multi-instrumental genre experimentation, the Turin-born genius has also written more than a few memorable film scores; his credits include France’s crowd-pleasing crossover smash “The Intouchables” and also Hirokazu Kore-eda’s somber, engrossing procedural, “The Third Murder.” The music in “Nomadland” evokes the borderless spirit of the American vagabond, largely through aching keyboard arrangements as well as divine use of silence and negative sonic space that all but confirms the commonly held belief that, sometimes, less truly is more. Einaudi’s music guides us through the open-ended journey of Frances McDormand’s rudderless protagonist, whether she’s stopping to admire a wild buffalo in a field, floating downstream in a river, an act that’s framed as a sort of baptism, or relishing the prospect of a new day to come. It’s a marvelous collection of work, and unquestionably one of 2020’s very best scores. – NL
3. “David Byrne’s American Utopia”
There has never been a time when the music of The Talking Heads hasn’t been relevant. As long as the human race is pleasantly adrift, the genre-bending tunes penned by David Byrne’s flagship band will always resonate. “American Utopia” is a beautiful reminder of the group’s idiosyncratic majesty: it’s a groundbreaking concert film experience that treats connection as spiritual currency. Director Spike Lee captures the acrobatic, aesthetically marvelous wonder of Byrne’s stage show with a minimum of fuss: songs that we cherish, like the immortal “Burning Down The House,” which inspires the kind of enthusiastic audience reaction one typically sees at houses of worship, take on a completely new meaning considering the context in which they are played. Other numbers off Byrne’s “American Utopia” LP, like the swaggering, gospel-accented “Lazy,” or the divine “One Fine Day,” are indelible enough that they sound like old standards, in spite of being (relatively) recent recordings. Byrne and company’s barn-burning rendition of Janelle Monae’s protest anthem “Hell You Talmbout” is the only juncture where Lee imposes some of his own recognizable style onto the proceedings, as the fire-and-brimstone choral howls mix with enraged pleas from the performers for the audience to say the names of innocent young Black men who were murdered by the police, all while Spike’s trademark dolly shot drives the point home with brute force. – NL
2. “Soul”
OK, first up, Disney Pixar’s “Soul” is a very odd and even abstract movie about a middle school music teacher and would-be professional jazz musician who gets the gig of his life, and then dies. Then he must navigate the afterlife back to his body on earth before it’s too late, there’s body-switching, tears, heartfelt uplifting shit. It is surprisingly amazing and emotional (given how weird and visually surreal it is at times). And then, there are two scores to Pixar’s “Soul” essentially, one from Jon Batiste, featuring all the jazz compositions and arrangements, and one from Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross. Both are truly lovely, and sometimes they feel like they even merge, or flow into one another, but the less traditionally jazzy stuff by Reznor and Ross, is truly out of this world. The simplistic way to describe it, is Reznor and Ross doing the bleeps and bloops of “The Social Network” and NIN, and perhaps music that you may think is more typical of them. The more accurate way to describe it is something absolutely transformative and molecule-changing, honestly, their greatest score ever. “Soul” is life-affirming in such a non-cheesy, deeply authentic way. It’s about a man, who in many ways, has played it safe his entire life to appease his domineering mother–who saw her departed jazz musician husband only struggle–but then has one amazing shot at fulfilling a lifelong dream only to see it almost immediately snatched from his hands. He has just one shot left to get this right with the clock racing against him so “Soul” has massive momentum, propulsion—especially in the afterlife sequences, or any time the souls hurtle back to Earth— but it has heart, soul, melancholy and just purely beautiful inspiring uplift. Moreover, there are easy, cheap, manipulative ways to achieve this in Hollywood movies and music and Reznor and Ross do not take one shortcut, crafting one of the most gorgeous pieces of music they have ever written without ever compromising their integrity, darkness, or spirit for one split second. – RP
1. “Minari
”Although Emile Mosseri, bass player and vocalist for NYC-based indie outfit The Dig, is a relative newcomer when it comes to scoring films (we should also mention that he’s done some exceptional work on TV’s “Random Acts Of Flyness,” as well as the second season of Amazon’s “Homecoming”), he’s already begun to develop a sonic signature that is entirely his own. Lee Isaac Chung’s “Minari,” which has garnered almost universal praise from critics and is undoubtedly one of 2020’s finest films, offers the gifted composer what might be his most expansive platform to date. The score for “Minari” is essentially a character in the film: it is emotive but essentially unobtrusive, acting as a kind of gentle emotional guide as the film observes a tenacious Korean patriarch working tirelessly to integrate his wife and children into the workday routines of pastoral American life. Mosseri’s score, like “Minari” itself, is rooted in a kind of transfixing and effortless simplicity: there’s nothing too boundary-pushing here, just sounds that evoke the film’s preferred mode of beatific quietude. While we suspect that hoping Mosseri is recognized by the Academy for “Minari” might be a pipe dream – they tend to favor more obvious, unapologetically melodramatic scores – there’s no disputing that this is a wonderful score to accompany a wonderful movie. – NL
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