Music! It is the beating soul beneath a film’s imagery, visuals, and performance. And one of the things we love most about writing about the Best Scores & Soundtracks of the year, in this case, 2022, is how it just makes us understand a film all over again on a deeper, more intuitive-level, especially when you’re just listening to a score or soundtrack on its own, without the context of a movie, and it’s just communicating so much to you. After the fact, you’re re-feeling, recontextualizing, reevaluating, and often, just seeing so much of the subtle and nuanced depth in a film you may not have seen the first time — the music often reminding you of the most delicate and or fleeting moment that you weren’t able to verbalize in that second in the theater.
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It’s always a great year for movies if you are diving beyond the surface (and seeing 50-100 films a year), and 2022 was no different. An additional plus of this feature is highlighting so many terrific scores from great movies that may not have made our best list, like Matthew Herbert’s score to “The Wonder” or Howard Shore’s “Crime Of The Future,” or even appreciating the music to a film that may not entirely work (Daniel Pemberton’s “Amsterdam” score).
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But overall, we had some bangers, Michael Giacchino revitalizing The Batman and proving blockbusters can still have some of the best music of the year, Alexandre Desplat and Justin Hurwitz showing us again why they are at the top of their field, Carter Burwell, arguably being one of the most underrated great composers in the world, and Jordan Peele composer Michael Abels, really flexing how he is one of the great up-and-comers throughout Peele’s ambitious films. Well, with all that in mind, in no particular order this time. The Best Scores and Soundtracks of 2022, and yes, some TV in there too because some brilliant pieces of music (Nicolas Britell and “Andor”) were just too amazing not to include.
Follow along with all our Best Of 2022 coverage here.
Michael Giacchino, “The Batman”
Four notes. Four notes are all the legendary-at-55 Michael Giacchino needs to solidify Matt Reeves’ take on Batman, one of the superhero canon’s true greats, with swelling orchestral ballast. It’s said that B.B. King could kill a man with just one note, but four ain’t too shabby. What Giacchino does with all the other notes available to him is impressive, too, lest we all think he nails it with the motif on “The Batman,” the Dark Knight’s main theme, but fumbles the rest: The wistful blues of “Catwoman,” the sparse hush building into a shuddering string cacophony on “The Riddler,” the seething distortion of “Highway to the Anger Zone” colliding with thunderous percussion. The movie has its moments and its share of flaws — three hours of relentless Darkness™ may be a bit too much — but Giacchino boosts the visual elements with arrangements ranging in style from sparing to maximalist, fist-pumping to horror-forward, somber to flat-out playful. “Meow and You and Everyone We Know”? Never let it be said that Giacchino doesn’t have a sense of humor. – Andrew Crump
Alexandre Desplat, “Pinocchio”
Alexandre Desplat’s name commands significant respect in the world of movie soundtracks, and this makes the bald unrespectability of one particular diddy on “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio’s” soundtrack an unexpected but not unwelcome hoot: “Big Baby Il Duce March,” a cheeky pottymouth reprise of “Fatherland March,” the official anthem of Benito Mussolini, Italy’s infamous short-stack fascist dictator-cum-manchild, where everyone’s favorite wooden boy swaps out blustering tough guy pro-authoritarian lyrics for diaper talk. “He poops on the land / He poops over sea / Big baby poops his pants / He’s just doo-doo to me,” rings Pinocchio (Gregory Mann) with naughty delight. Granted, this is not the only wonder Desplat contributes to the film’s soundtrack, performed using only wood instruments – a challenge he set for himself that, though not necessary per se, dovetails so beautifully with del Toro’s tactile stop motion that imagining him scoring the picture any other way almost feels shameful. – AC
Justin Hurwitz, “Babylon”
Set at the height of the jazz age, Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” is a bombastic three-hour epic about the Hollywood film industry in flux as silent filmmaking gives way to synchronized sound. Its score by Justin Hurwitz, whose score for Chazelle’s contemporary Hollywood-set fantasy “La La Land” netted him an Oscar, sets the frenetic tone with aplomb. Hot jazz densely layered with dozens of instruments in the style of traveling big bands and undulating vocalizations perfectly matches the film’s orgiastic vibe. As the characters’ stories collide, repeated themes intertwine, evolving and devolving through myriad innovative chord progressions and unexpected tempo changes. Just as Chazelle’s deft script combines the highs and lows of Hollywood history (and its often perverse mythology), Hurwitz’s music journeys through contrasting jazz styles of the era, crafting an energetic score that feels equally at home in the film’s late-1920s setting, but also, due to Hurwitz’s use of modern club dance beats, at a multiplex in the 2020s as well. I dare you to find another score that will have you dancing in the aisles quite like this one.- Marya E. Gates
Michael Abels, “Nope”
Spaghetti Westerns, summer blockbusters, and Jordan Peele; these are the three key reference points Michael Abels plays with on his soundtrack for Peele’s “Nope,” where sibling horse trainers discover a UFO swooping through the clouds around their ranch and set out to capture the ship on camera – except it isn’t a ship, but a massive alien predator whose diet consists primarily of anyone dumb enough to look it in the eye (so to speak). The Western element is Abels’ constant; he ties the genre’s tenor into the film’s central theme, after all, where clarion whistling takes the lead and twangy acoustic guitar strums provide the tune’s foundation. But string sections occupy prime real estate elsewhere on the “Nope” soundtrack, particularly on the one-two sequence of “It’s In The Cloud” and “Holy Sh*t It’s Real,” which, taken together, put to sound the combined awe and terror of witnessing alien life on Earth while knowing that the alien life wants to munch you. Abels does broad grandeur well. It’s the unnerving trembling of violins, though, that gets under the viewer’s skin the way that “Nope” ought to. – AC
Oliver Coates, “Aftersun”
The most memorable music from Charlotte Wells’ “Aftersun” is found in the film’s needle drops, but don’t take this as disrespect for Oliver Coates. It’s hard to beat Wells’ use of Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” in the third act, where capricious single dad Calum (Paul Mescal) and his 11-year-old daughter Sophie (Frankie Corio) embrace on a resort club dance floor as the song soars overhead, a moment orchestrated carefully and organically for maximum emotional resonance. (Put less prettily, it’s very sad.) But Coates is tuned into what Wells sets out to do in the rest of the movie, where Calum and Sophie bond but only loosely, and she glances at him, either from the corner of her eye or head-on, and tries to see the man inside and not just the one in front of her; Coates grasps the elusion in their relationship, and opts for unobstructive production that lilts about the movie’s edges instead of pounding their way into the frame. – AC
