Music in Film: Favorite scores, songs, soundtracks, and scenes

All great directors have a great sense of music in their films:

Kubrick:





Tarantino:

See above.

Hitchcock:




Scorsese:




Woody Allen:



Good music is such an important part of a great movie.


My favorite movie score of all time:


My favorite music moment of all time in film:

A couple more from Tarantino films that I love.

Rabbia E Tarantella by the great Ennio Morricone used in Inglourious Basterds.



The David Bowie song used in the film might sound odd, but actually works brilliantly as well in this great scene:

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Another favorite soundtrack song:





I hated the movie, but Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers with Lindsey Buckingham on backing vocals = pure awesome.

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^ Yep, that Cat People sequence is fantastic in the film.

For me a good soundtrack can make a large difference. Though, that doesn't mean that a bad movie can become good due to the soundtrack and a great movie can be great despite a mediocre soundtrack, such as Ikiru, Citizen Kane or Late Spring and other movies of the mid 20th century.

The three best film composers of the 20th century were:

- Miklós Rózsa
- John Williams
- Joe Hisaishi

The fourth best may be Ennio Morricone, but he is clearly below these three.

I rate Miyazaki movies as highly as I do partly thanks to the soundtracks, which remain my favorite film compositions and the scores are done by japanese composer Joe Hisaishi who is by far the best movie composer ever and the only one that I actually care enough to purchase much of his work. Hisaishi also made scores for dozens of other movies, such as Kitano's films, but his best scores remains those he did under Miyazaki.

Hisaishi done the score for Departures, for example:



Hisaishi's style consists of maximizing the amount of emotion that he can extract from each note. A consequence of the fact that he was a minimalist music composer before Miyazaki found him. Later on he became more orchestral without losing his extraordinary efficiency for maximum emotion per note. Some have even criticized him on the grounds that his scores were "overemotional".

Hisaishi two best scores are Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke have the two best soundtracks ever. I have listened to the soundtracks of these two movies dozens of times, more times than I have watched the movies! The soundtracks of these two movies are better, alone, than 90% of all the movies I ever watched.







Nausicaa also has a great soundtrack, perhaps the third best I ever listened:



His score for Howl's Moving Castle is amazing, relatively better than the movie (one of Miyazaki's weakest):



There are great film compositions beyond Hisaishi's, of course. After Hisaishi my next two favorite film composers are Miklós Rózsa and John Willians. But there is still some distance, Hisaishi's work feels more postmodern and fits more in my tastes than the old-school approach of these two.

The best soundtrack of the 1950's was Ben-Hur's by Miklós Rózsa, perhaps the best film composer of classic hollywood (I am not particularly fond of the scores from the 1940's and 1950's, they seem a bit flat and dated):

Part 1


Part 2


One of the best contemporary composers is John Williams, whose best composition remains Star Wars, which is considered the best Hollywood score of all time (and I agree, it is the best score of an English language movie I remember listening).

The original Star Wars soundtrack is my 4th favorite film score ever, after Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa, rich and magical.





John Willians also did interesting work for many other movies, such as Warhorse, although the rest of the movie wasn't that good:



Note: I am talking about film scores composed for the films, not about pop music used in film or classical pieces used in film, such as Kubrick's films.

This is my favourite from the Inglourious Basterds soundtrack, another excellent piece from the great Morricone, and I loved the scene in which Tarantino used it.

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Letterboxd

People here have talked about Morricone without mentioning his best pieces, such as his The Good, The Bad and The Ugly score:



And returning to Ghibli soundtracks....

Besides Joe Hisaishi compositions, some other Ghibli films have great soundtracks. Grave of the Fireflies soundtrack is also excellent, though not beign Hisaishi, it is a bit more simple:



Only Yesterday, one of the best movies of the 1990's (yeay! Only Yesterday!!!!!!!!!), also has an interesting theme soundtrack, feauting Hungarian folk music:

Not even Gladiator? Hans Zimmer is considered to be one of the best film composers. He is German after all, just like Mozart, Beethoven and Kreator, and Germany is the country with has contributed more to music than any other.



While I don't like his work as much as Willians and Hisaishi, he still has produced some excellent compositions (and several mediocre ones, such as The Dark Knight's).

One of the best playlists on youtube 100 tracks played on piano by Hisaishi:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...B6ZH6frZX9ti4G

Largest concentration of top notch movie music on youtube.

two words: Thomas Newman

Loads of good chocies on here already.

Love the music used throughout The Dark Knight, something primevil about the sythesized neverending violin that puts you on edge.

For me, John Williams' Jurassic Park soundtrack. Whenever I hear the main theme, I get goosebumps.

Might be down to seeing JP when I was a kid at the cinema, we got there about an hour early and it was being played over the speakers in the lobby, for me it sums up the anticipation of seeing a movie for the first time and the anticipation and mystery of what we were going to witness.

Just a childhood excitement thing I guess...

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Citizen Kane's soundtrack is NOT mediocre.

This song actually plays during the credits, but I counted it and posted it because of its relevancy to the story and themes of the film it follows - A Scanner Darkly.

The song's good enough on its own.

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~ I am tired of ze same old faces! Ze same old things!

Close enough. Love Me Tonight

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

The Eraserhead soundtrack is an all time great, and so is the Americana minimalism of Neil Young's Dead Man soundtrack.

EDIT: Move along nothing to see here

Was I missing?

Perhaps there was some other user who also liked Brakhage with a similar name at some point? In which case I've failed in my attempt to have a non generic movie related name.