The 30 Best Film Scores & Soundtracks Of 2016

It’s been something of a mixed year for movies in some ways — a fairly sparse first half of the year, including the worst blockbuster season in living memory, followed by an absolutely rammed fall season that, even more than most, has seen a wealth of pleasures in movie theaters. But one thing for sure is that it’s been a really great year for music and the movies (and yes, .)

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Perhaps appropriately for a year where a musical looks to be the Oscar front-runner, we’ve had all kinds of wonderful scores and soundtracks, from a young composer turning the biopic on its head to an instantly iconic Netflix synthpop score, from a blast of original hip-hop from a little-seen indie to some unusually convincing comedy songs from some ex-SNLers. (And in case you’re wondering, Michael Giacchino‘s work for “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” wasn’t seen in time for consideration) Below, as part of our ongoing look at the best of 2016 (catch up on all our coverage here), we’ve picked out the best 30 scores and soundtracks — take a look, and let us know your own favorite movie/music crossovers in the comments.

Click here for our complete 2016 year-end coverage

edge-of-seventeen30. “The Edge Of Seventeen”
Without a great soundtrack, a great teen movie is like, well, a teen without a prom date, and fortunately “The Edge Of Seventeen,” one of the best examples of the genre in recent years, delivers musically as well as cinematically. Kelly Fremon Craig’s charming, smart and authentic film, starring Hailee Steinfeld as a socially awkward high schooler in crisis, owes something to the early work of Cameron Crowe (even sharing a producer in James L. Brooks), and Craig has a similar feel for a great soundtrack drop. There’s little that’s retro here — it’s a relatively up-to-the-minute selection of indie, hip-hop and pop from artists including Santigold, Anderson Paak, Two Door Cinema Club, A$AP Ferg, The 1975 and The Cinematic Orchestra — but it also doesn’t feel like a cheap and cynical marketing tool gathering up recent pop hits like lesser teen movies do. Instead, it feels genuinely curated, like a playlist that Steinfeld’s Nadine would put together to send to a boy, and it has the same mix of breezy pop happiness and melancholy that makes the film something special, despite the occasional bum note, like a lousy cover of Sweet’s Ballroom Blitz by British glam-rock revivalists The Struts.

READ MORE: The 50 Best Film Scores Of The 21st Century So Far

Podcast: Adjust Your Tracking Examines Both Ends Of The Modern Exploitation Spectrum With'Green Room' &'Hardcore Henry'29. “Green Room”
Given that it’s a movie centered on a hardcore punk band — albeit one that, in what proved to be an unfortunate metaphor for America right now, end up besieged by Neo-Nazis — Jeremy Saulnier’s “Green Room” would have been lost without authenticity. Fortunately, The Ain’t Rights, the band within the film (made up of Callum Turner, Joe Cole, the late, much-missed Anton Yelchin and Alia Shawkat), feel like they have the right stuff musically, thanks to the presence of The ThermalsHutch Harris as a technical consultant, and energetic performances of some covers, most memorably including Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.” The film also includes a few other punk bangers on the soundtrack, but its musical secret weapon might be in the eerily drony score by Brooke and Will Blair. The brothers of Macon Blair, who starred in their previous collaboration with Saulnier, “Blue Ruin,” and gives a great little supporting turn here, they do just as much to give the film its ominous atmosphere as Sean Porter’s killer photography does. It’s a slightly uneasy mix when you listen to it as a record, vacillating between the sinister score and the abrasive tunes, but it couldn’t work better in the movie.

10-cloverfield-lane28. “10 Cloverfield Lane”
TV has to be a pretty great training ground for a composer — cranking out episode after episode on a weekly basis surely hones your talent, and someone like Michael Giacchino, who only broke into movies after scoring dozens of episodes of “Lost” and “Alias” certainly bears that out. And Bear McCreary looks like he’s about to make a similar leap. McCreary got his first break on “Battlestar Galactica,” being promoted to composer of the show when Richard Gibbs left after the miniseries. He’s become one of genre TV’s most prevalent composers thanks to shows like “The Walking Dead” and “Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D,” while also somehow finally finding time for the occasional movie, mostly in the horror sphere like this year’s “The Forest” and “The Boy.” But McCreary’s work on Dan Trachtenberg’s hugely enjoyable “10 Cloverfield Lane” should bump him to another level. It’s quite a classical score in some respects, a restraint that matches the frills-free, almost classical approach that the director takes, but the thumping bass drums, Hermann-ish strings and general creeping dread does so much to sustain the film despite its slim cast and small scope. Expect him to be as busy as Giacchino in the movies soon.

READ MORE: Michael Giacchino Will Score ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’

fantastic-beasts-and-where-to-find-them27. “Fantastic Beasts & Where To Find Them”
With John Williams having delivered yet another deeply iconic and evocative theme to join “Star Wars,” “Superman” and Indiana Jones in his repertoire when he scored the first Harry Potter movie, and Patrick Doyle and Alexandre Desplat stepping into his shoes with subsequent entries, James Newton Howard had some big boots to fill when it came to wizard prequel “Fantastic Beasts & Where To Find Them.” But the veteran composer did a very fine job with his first Potter-verse score. Tipping its 1920s-style fedora to Williams’ work on the earlier films (directly quoting the main Potter theme at the beginning before bursting into its own thing, and with the occasional choir that evokes an oft-used device in the earlier films), it nevertheless carves out its own territory, with a decidedly, and appropriately, more American vibe. There’s hints of sloping jazz and of Gershwin in places, of world music mimicking Newt Scamander’s travels in others, and plenty of magic and blockbuster bombast where required. It’s a shame that Newton Howard can’t quite find the same kind of indelible theme that Williams provided “Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone,” but with umpteen ‘Fantastic Beasts’ movies to come, there’s plenty of time for that.

Everybody Wants Some!!26. “Everybody Wants Some!!”
Richard Linklater’s latest was long billed as a sort of spiritual sequel to his much-loved teen classic “Dazed & Confused,” and while it doesn’t quite match up to the 1993 film in most respects, the film’s soundtrack is a worthy successor. The 1980 setting, four years on from ‘Dazed,’ provides a few new opportunities to broaden the horizons — we get some new wave from Blondie and Gary Numan, some punk from Cheap Trick and even a little disco and hip-hop including a memorable use of “Rapper’s Delight,” for instance, but it’s otherwise mostly in a similar classic rock/stoner vein as the earlier movie, with ZZ Top, Frank Zappa, Foreigner, Pink Floyd, Queen, Van Halen (with the song that gives the film its title) and similar artists all rubbing shoulders. These aren’t obscure picks, on the whole — the movie opens with “My Sharona” and goes on to include “Good Times,” “Heart Of Glass,” “Another Bites The Dust” and “Whip It.” But it doesn’t feel like lazy nostalgia either, more an evocation of the music that must have been in the air during Linklater’s own college days. It’s an eminently listenable collection, and one that does so much to give the movie its pleasingly loose vibes.

Pete's Dragon25. “Pete’s Dragon”
The question, when the surprising announcement came that David Lowery, the breakout director of “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” was directing a biggish-budget remake of 70s curio “Pete’s Dragon” for Disney, was whether Lowery would be absorbed into the studio system and turn out something “Maleficent”-ish, or make something more comparable with his earlier work. The answer, as anyone who’s seen the film will be aware, is very much the latter: Lowery makes a film that feels much more personal and old school than we’ve come to expect from a Disney blockbuster, and it carries through to the music as well. Not only does it feature some inspired song choices in exactly the sort of Portland hipster-folk area as you might expect (new cuts by Bonnie Prince Billy and St. Vincent, plus the late great Leonard Cohen’s “So Long, Marianne”), but it also features a charming score by composer Daniel Hart. Hart did phenomenal work on Lowery’s last movie, but has oddly not done much of note since, but hopefully his score here proves a reminder of his talents: it’s a gorgeous thing, reminiscent of classic Disney scores and particularly John Williams, but with an Americana folksiness of its own. It’s rousing, soaring stuff, and suggests bigger and bigger things for Hart down the line.

jorma-taccone-and-andy-samberg-in-popstar--never-stop-never-stopping-(2016)-large-picture24. “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping”
The idea of the comedy song is usually a horrifying one — only a few, like Spinal Tap, have really pulled off the trick of being genuinely funny while not being musically awful. The Lonely Island — aka Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer — have made their careers on one of the few that can do it these days, with a string of hip-hop parodies that also had a pleasing earworm quality. And while their movie “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping,” might not have a classic on its soundtrack to match “I’m On A Boat,” “I Just Had Sex” or “Jack Sparrow,” it’s still kind of a joy. A parody like this lives and dies on its verisimilitude, and that’s always been a virtue of The Lonely Island’s, who’ve deployed real megastars and top-quality production, and that’s no exception here, with Pink, Michael Bolton, Adam Levine and Emma Stone among the guests on the song, while Chris Redd’s Hunter The Hungry’s songs could have been lifted from a Tyler The Creator record. And while you’ll be humming the hooks, the songs remain legitimately funny, particularly savage over-defensive Macklemore parody “Equal Rights” and the creatively-spent “Mona Lisa.” Again, it doesn’t quite hit some of the heights as before, and as a record the soundtrack goes on a bit long, but to be as entertaining as this on a consistent level is still a feat.