Music is another big part of my life. I love seeing how much impact the music can have on a film. So, I have a question. What are your favourite film scores?

Here's one of mine...



Haven't even seen the film, but the score's amazing!

I think the soundtrack to 'Drive' is excellent.  It made the movie feel more 80's, despite most of the tracks actually being modern recordings.

Rather than go with a 'soundtrack' that sounds like the 80s, I listen to stuff from the 80s. But I don't really do soundtracks. Mainly, I do scores. Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams, John Barry, Bernard Herrmann, James Horner, Henry Mancini, Michael Kamen, Alan Silvestri.

Goldsmith kinda scored a lot of movies that I loved as a kid, then once I started listening to his music, I found more movies to love as an older kid. The thing I love about his work is that he was versatile. He could come up with a really beautiful theme or something really creepy or just something that sounded strange.

Williams is just the best. His form of scoring is a lost art. I mean, what happened to the days of walking out of a theater, being able to whistle a theme or two for the main characters?

I've always been a Barry fan because of his work on the Bond franchise, but his other work's pretty amazing, too. For a while, I thought most of his scores were really stringy and boring, but in the 60s and 70s, he was all over the place. "The Lion in Winter" is one of the coolest, creepiest scores for a not-creepy film of all time and probably the best score to a medieval/Middle Ages movie ever.

Bernard Herrmann was the best before Williams. While he's best known for Psycho, I can't get enough of North by Northwest.

Horner's had a lot of bland scores--especially recently, but the work he did in the earlier part of his career were phenomenal. Star Trek II & III, Aliens, Willow, Glory, The Rocketeer. Occasionally, he does scores that sound like his early days, but I'm not sure if he's just not on his A-game anymore or if directors/producers just don't utilize him well. He's been known to be pretty repetitive, but I don't have too much of a problem with it.

Mancini wrote some of the most memorable themes in cinema, but I REALLY love his horror scores. Two that I've listened to a lot in the past few years have been Lifeforce and Nightwing.

Kamen was good in the 80s. Dead Zone, Brazil, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, Baron Munchausen...all amazing scores. In the 90s, he started slipping a little and I don't think he ever reached that kind of greatness again.

I'll say the same for Silvestri. In the 80s, his stuff was really interesting for Back to the Future and Predator and even The Abyss, but toward the end of the 90s, he wasn't that interesting. Then he did The Mummy Returns, which was pretty good, and now he's like the Marvel guy. His Marvel scores were okay, but they weren't Predator or BTTF.

As for Zimmer, I officially don't like him. Some of his music's good and fits with the movies he's scored, but he's just been responsible for film scores going to crap. He created a production house back in the 90s called Media Ventures (now Remote Control Productions), and it employs a lot of common composers: Ramin Djawadi, Klaus Badelt, John Powell, Harry Gregson-Williams, and a bunch of other composers. Some of them just think all drums and no melody make a score. Others get a bit more melodic, but they stay generic. Sometimes that's okay, but considering where we were 20-30 years ago, with the likes of Williams and Goldsmith...we've fallen from grace.

I really like Christopher Young's work.

Hellraiser, Copycat, Excorism Of Emily Rose, Ghost Rider.

I also enjoyed Harry Gregson-Williams, Howard Shore and Ry Cooder.
yes, Ry Cooder. His slide guitar scores for some of those Walter Hill films are terrific to this day, specifically Johnny Handsome and The Long Riders.

If we wanna go with something I just saw, Beasts of the Southern Wild has an outstanding score.

Check it out.

A couple of composers I'm fond of that have not already been mentioned are Danny Elfman and Murray Gold.

Danny Elfman is best known for his constant collaboration with Tim Burton since Elfman appears to be Burton's go-to music guy. Check his IMDB profile and you'll find an impressive resume of not only the dark scores he is known for, but TV themes and movies like Charlotte's Web that aren't exactly dark. He does have a distinctive style that can be largely attributed to his lifelong collaboration with orchestrator Steve Bartek, who is the other half of the team responsible for Elfman's particular sound. He even wrote the songs and performed the singing voice of Jack Skellington for The Nightmare Before Christmas, but of course, by then, he'd been the lead singer/songwriter for Oingo Boingo for over a decade.

Murray Gold is actually best known for his cinematic scoring of the new Doctor Who series. TV shows aren't exactly renowned for their musical scores, but Murray Gold set the bar at an unrealistic level when it comes to scoring for TV. The revived 2005 series of Doctor Who possesses some of the best music I've heard on anything, and Gold keeps cranking them out for each episode. Some themes are recycled because characters have themes, but each week isn't just another round of stock music. Each show had its own share of original music, which is probably a testament to how seriously the BBC is taking the series this time around, since a lot of shows probably don't spring for much of a music budget. The piece of music that scored the tenth to eleventh doctor regeneration sequence, called Vale Decem, is one of the best pieces of music I've ever heard, ranking right up there with the masters of classical music. I can listen to it a million times, and I don't get tired of it. When married to the scene it was written for, it is magical. He has the knack, for sure.

I knew I was forgetting someone! Danny Elfman, yes! Although I'm a much bigger fan of his earlier stuff than his recent outings. He's like Horner and Silvestri: mind-blowing in the 80s, then meh afterwards. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is one of my favorites, along with Batman. I kinda like Back to School, but probably just because it's such a zany movie.

Apart from the obvious (Morricone, Williams, Carpenter) I've always liked Howard Shore, mostly from the stuff he does on Cronenberg's films.

I think James Horner's great. (for Aliens mostly).

I like Vangelis as well.

There's a guy called Akira Yamaoka, who scores the Silent Hill video games, and he's a genius.

D'oh! You said Morricone, another one I've been digging a lot lately. I was REALLY hoping he'd do an original score for Django Unchained, since he almost did for Inglourious Basterds. And Vangelis...but I really only like Blade Runner. And "Opera Sauvage", as heard in Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously.

Speaking of Weir, that dude has some strange musical tastes. His movies in the 80s were saturated with synthesizer. Upon first viewing, it was a little distracting, but it kinda works. Jarre's score for Witness is almost hypnotic and certainly addictive over time. One of the first vinyl scores I bought.

Currently [and repeatedly] listening to "The Last of Ida" from Goldsmith's Chinatown. That opening 30 seconds is some of the best music Jerry ever wrote. Right up there with "The Enterprise." The rest of the track's pretty uneven, though, because it's such a dissonant contrast to the beginning.

Anything by Jon Brion or Carter Burwell.

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis has done some great work for The Proposition and The Assassination of Jesse James...

Some others that come to mind:

Rumble Fish
There Will Be Blood
My Son, My Son, what Have ye Done
Inception
Night on Earth

Alien
Inception
The Grey
Capricorn One
The Thing (1982)
The Godfather

Quoted from sniper Alien Inception The Grey Capricorn One The Thing (1982) The Godfather

It's funny this thread comes up right after I just got an epic score CD.
Both you and Basket zeroed in on The Thing.
The final scored used in the film was never available to the public.

It started with Morricone making all his own cues.
Then after a meet in L.A. with Carpenter, he added the two beat electric thump.
And in post production, Alan Howarth came up with some cues for Carpenter.

Fitting that this film have a hodge podge score, given the creature's nature!

And now that music is faithfully reconstructed on a CD finally!
Alan Howarth went back and remade the entire thing with upgraded technology.

For the first time ever, the score of The Thing can be enjoyed as it was in cinemas!
There's only 1500 copies pressed. Ever.

The real gold here is Morricone's electric realization and...
The Carpenter/Howarth tracks available for the first time ever!
Only Morricone's first score was released in the 80s.

So, I think perhaps a few folks here might want one of these...

Conan the Barbarian (original not the crap remake) - An example where the music alone (Poledouris) elevates the movie.

I know it's not a film, but on film, I discovered this show called Misfits. The tone of the show is juxtaposed with an epic score. The song selection is outstanding as well. There was a scene recently where the score was so riviting, only to be followed by, "I found your cock." I can't ever recall any thing I've seen like it.

Quoted from Electric Dreamer The final scored used in the film was never available to the public.

You sure about that, ED? The one I have sounds an awefully lot like the one used in the movie (and a lot better than the Carpenter/Howarth version - the clicking between the base thumps are just too darn loud).

These are a few (and best) of the ones I have:

Humanity, part 1 (the Norwegian camp)


Humanity, part 2 (opening title)