Which movie(s) do you think has the best soundtrack?
I think American Psycho has a good soundtrack and I listen to it occasionaly.
The Blues Brothers - it’s literally stringing together performances from famous musicians
- Ray Charles
- James Brown
- Aretha Franklin
- Cab Galloway
- etc.
The Fountain, Requiem for a Dream, or anything by Clint Mansell
This is an old one, but:
The Mission, scored by Ennio Morricone.
Tron Legacy, but that’s cheating as it’s essentially a Daft Punk music video.
The grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see. And then. One day. I got in…
But to be honest: Its a good music video
One of my favorite
Conan the Barbarian
Resident evil
Dred 2012
Redline
Desparado https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0112851/
Amazing soundtrack!
The album has been seen as presaging the dark ambient music genre, and its presentation of background noise and non-musical cues has been described by Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson as “a sound track (two words) in the literal sense”. -wikipedia
The mood and tone of Eraserhead and its soundtrack were influenced by Philadelphia’s post-industrial history. Lynch lived in the city while studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and was fascinated by its feeling of constant danger; describing it both as a “sick, twisted, violent, fear ridden, decaying place” and “beautiful, if you see it the right way.”[8][9][1] Lynch and Splet used avant-garde approaches to recording on the soundtrack; including crafting almost every sound in the soundtrack from scratch using bizarre methods. The ambiance of the love scene in the movie, for example, was produced by recording air blown through a microphone as it sat inside a bottle floating in a bathtub.[10] Lynch and Splet worked “9 hours a day for 63 days” to produce the soundtrack and all of the sound effects in the film. Splet recalls the sound effects Lynch called on him to produce for Eraserhead as "snapping, humming, buzzing, banging, like lightning, shrieking, squealing” over the five years it took to produce the film and its soundtrack. -wikipedia
The Matrix
O Brother Where Art Thou?
Forest Gump+1 for The Matrix. I once watched the film at a theater where the music was played live by an orchestra. One of my favorite movie experiences of all time. The soundtrack is incredible.
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Birdman. Just drums. Really fucking good drums. Also they appear in the middle of one scene in an excellent way.
Also: not a movie, but Cowboy Bebop. Lots and lots of great tracks.
I know you said movies, but a soundtrack for a show I’m hooked on currently is Legion (FX/Marvel, on Hulu). The whole entire show has an amazing cast to begin with, but Jeff Russo (Fargo, Star Trek Discovery, more) and Noah Hawley put together one hell of a score. I highly recommend it and the show.
Could not agree more, Legion has an absolutely amazing score/soundtrack. The Bolero scene? Legendary.
Since you’ve broadened it out to TV, I’ll use that as an excuse and mention that I think Nicholas Britell’s score for Andor is pretty cracking too.
Tombstone and Almost Famous for me
More general answer than you expected, but…
I really like when the sound design in movies makes sense - it “plays” in radio, gramophone…
For example “Black hole sun” cover in first episode of Westworld is just brilliant and caught me off guard (I didn’t know what it is about).
The adjective for this type of music is “diegetic”. That’s sound which is occurring and audible in-universe, not just to the audience.
My favourite example of this is in Grosse Point Blank, when the GNR cover of Live and Let Die is playing non-diagetically, right until the moment Martin walks into the store, and suddenly a cheesy muzak version of it is playing over the shop radio. It’s beautifully done :-)
TIL, thanks.
Haven’t watched it yet, but I love Black Hole Sun. I’ll definately check it out
If you don’t know anything about Westworld - don’t read reviews…
The mindfuck from the first season is worth it when you go blind in to it. The soundtrack is making the vibe of it even more disturbing/disorienting.
I’m going to reframe this as who I think the best composers are:
Bernard Hermann, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, etc.
John Williams, E.T., Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, etc.
Akira Ifukube, most of the Shōwa era Godzilla movies
Shiro Shigasu, Evangelion, Shin Godzilla
As far as new work, I’m partial to Scott Stafford on Ultraman Rising. It came out on Netflix this past June and I was really surprised how good that movie and soundtrack were.
Once upon a time the west. (Ennio Morricone)
Blade runner (Vangelis)
