The 50 Best Film Scores Of The 21st Century So Far - Page 4 of 5

20. “The Motorcycle Diaries” (2004) – Gustavo Santaolalla
Brokeback Mountain,” “Babel,” “21 Grams” (two of which won Oscars) – there are plenty of evocative scores to choose from Gustavo Santaolalla’s body of work. But it’s the soulful and windswept empathy of “The Motorcycle Diaries”— Walter Salles‘ South American travelogue and journey of personal discovery—that provokes the heart the most. Rich in mood and introspective texture, complex-stringed acoustic balladery is haunting. Santaolalla’s meditative scores are always reverberating and flush with contemplation and longing, but “Diarios de Motocicleta” is simply luminous.

19. ‘Ocean’s’ Series (2001-2007) – David Holmes
Holmes could be on here for earlier films, like “Out of Sight,” or later films like Yann Demange‘s great “‘71” so putting him on for a trilogy is not that much of a cheat. Scoring Soderbergh’s fun, unserious Rat Pack remake with jazzy exotica he instantly sets the dial of “Ocean’s Eleven” to “effortlessly cool.” The underrated “Ocean’s Twelve” features his best work of the series, bringing an outré, European flavor, and rocking out harder too, and if ‘Thirteen‘ marks a return to a jazzier ’60s influence and is slighter than the previous two scores, it is still the third film’s strongest, most breezily enjoyable element.

18. “Moneyball” (2011) – Mychael Danna
Post-rocker This Will Destroy You’s “The Mighty Rio Grande”—the veritable theme song of the movie, used in the trailer—might take up a lot of the memorable space in “Moneyball,” but to neglect Mychael Danna’s stirring score is to neglect an integral part of the movie’s emotional weight. Particularly striking is Danna’s rousing, circular cello suite that begins with “Coaching” and travels through four pieces to serve as a beautiful uplift to tentative hope. “Moneyball,” might be all math, statistics and percentages, but director Bennett Miller wisely utilizes Danna’s inspiring compositions as the sports movie’s winning heart.

17. “28 Days Later” (2003) – John Murphy
When director Danny Boyle couldn’t convince doomsdaying end-is-nigh orchestral rockers Godspeed You! Black Emperor to score his back-to-basics digitally-shot zombie picture, he instead turned to composer John Murphy to pull off a similarly alarming and chilling sonic sense of dread. Moving pretty quickly from ethereal dreamscapes to bombastic, industrial rock nightmare, John Murphy’s “28 Days Later” score fits nicely in the desolate yet beautiful vision of Boyle’s paranoid portrait of an apocalyptic zombie takeover. It’s also a score that’s been aped in several trailers and films, perhaps one of the more memorably sinister soundtracks made this entire decade.

16. “The Duke of Burgundy” (2015) – Cat’s Eyes (Faris Badwan and Rachel Zeffira)
Berberian Sound Studio” was a film about sonic design and in director Peter Strickland‘s follow-up, there was no let up in exacting attention to aural detail. For his deceptively tender kink-romance “The Duke Of Burgundy,” he enlisted Cat’s Eyes, aka Faris Badwan of British art-pop band The Horrors, and Canadian soprano Rachel Zeffira. The band’s self-titled album was a musical highlight of 2011, but their score for Strickland’s film marks a departure, dropping the psychedelic mod-pop for haunting, baroque folk. With influences as diverse as Nino Rota, John Barry and “The Wicker Man” it’s a lush, organic sonic wonderland, with prominent harpsichord, flute and oboe flourishes summoning exquisite beauty, while something rots in the fragrant, deviant darkness beneath.

15. “Volver” (2006) – Alberto Iglesias
Pedro Almodovar‘s “Volver” is a deceptively complex work, part passionate melodrama, part family chronicle, part Hitchockian-thriller and part riotous comedy. Negotiating those disparate, eclectic moods deftly is his longtime composer Alberto Iglesias (whose work in “Talk To Her” and other Almodovars is also terrific, and whose understated score for “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” was on an earlier incarnation of this list). Using every color in the film’s palette of genres and moods, Iglesias turns in one of the most vibrant, life-brimming scores, full of dark and light and death and sex and wind and chopped tomatoes: perfectly attuned to the film that is still the Spanish mischief-maker’s greatest work.

14. “All Is Lost” (2013) – Alex Ebert
Former Ima Robot and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros singer/songwriter Alex Ebert (who also worked brilliantly on Chandor’s next film “A Most Violent Year“) had an unenviable task in scoring J.C. Chandor’s survival film. A largely dialogue-free story of one man in a sinking boat means the music has to do a lot of dramatic heavy lifting yet his mournful ethereal dirge refrains deliver. Music that only becomes more desperately searching as the situation worsens it accompanies a man vs the elements tale. But when even that battle appears lost, and all you have left is to face is your Maker, this angelic, haunting score may very well be the music you hear.

13. “Solaris” (2002) – Cliff Martinez
What is the soundtrack to celestial, futuristic ambiguity? How do you imagine the sound of otherworldly uncertainty, where you don’t know if you’re hallucinating or dead or really experiencing the impossible, like a deceased lover come back to life? Steven Soderbergh wisely hit up an old collaborator, Cliff Martinez —who composed the score to “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” is the former drummer for Captain Beefheart and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and who earned one of his first composing credits for, of all things, “Pee Wee’s Playhouse” — to create the unnervingly anxious, low-key pulsations and low-end chimes of this electronica score. It’s incredibly disconcerting but also walks that precise line where wonder and dread meet and ellide, like the film’s blurred border between reality and imagination.

12. “Carol” (2015) – Carter Burwell
The gorgeous score for Todd Haynes’ “Carol,” finally brought Carter Burwell, longtime Coens collaborator to the Academy’s attention – it was only his bad luck that Ennio Morricone had finally relented and done a Tarantino score that same year. His work on the beautiful, glowingly restrained “Carol’ is far from the most elaborate score here: simple piano and some strings, with the most stand-out element being the notable use of woodwind instruments (“B-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon — all of these things have a period, urban quality… it felt like the look of the film,” he told EW). The result is melancholy without being mournful, lush and romantic without being sentimental or melodrama-pastichey, and classical without feeling old-fashioned. Along with the period-perfect song choices, this is music to fall in forbidden love to.

11. “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (2012)– Dan Rohmer and Benh Zeitlin
Even those of us not won over by “Beasts of the Southern Wild” can freely admit that in the music, the various impulses of social commentary, folk lament and fantasy blend perfectly. Dan Rohmer and director Benh Zeitlin layer syrupy, thick strings onto brass band pomp, and really know how to build to a crescendo. It’s one of the rare modern scores that is both hummable and nuanced, thrumming underneath most of the time, then bursting forth like a flower or a sparkler, at key moments. Strings, piano and mournful horns bring us through the ups and downs of Hushpuppy’s odyssey, until that final, full-on marching tune, the theme tune to a massive, indomitable spirit crammed into a tiny, girl-shaped package.