Our favorite scores of 2023 are wide-ranging. They include everything from intimate love stories to inventive looks into the past to the biggest and loudest blockbusters. We have animated juggernauts and weirder, wilder genre swings alongside the films that probably will get more awards attention for their scores — along with all their other categories. Some scores have gone viral on TikTok, and some have yet to have the chance; although if anything deserves its own TikTok trend, it is Robbie Robertson’s last, greatest work on “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
Whether as big as the universe or as small-scale as a lapsed relationship, whether orchestral, electronic, or a mix of both, this year’s best film scores go after a variety of different moods and presences inside their films. Constant hums and whirs animate films like “Poor Things” while the musical howl of “The Zone of Interest” only appears a handful of times throughout that film. But all of the best scores of 2023 make an instant impression.
And what unites all our choices is that the best scores of 2023 find ways to capture the scope of their stories through music, become an integral part of their films’ pacing, and innovate interesting sounds to better get at the heart of their characters. From Hilder Guðnadóttir’s foray into unnervingly parred-down chamber music on “A Haunting in Venice” to Daniel Pemberton’s ramp-up of the roaring beats of “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” to Kris Bowers and Michael Abel incorporating and interpreting classical works by the title character on “Chevalier,” there’s been a lot of experimentation among composers in 2023. But what’s most exciting is that the best film scores of 2023 are this varied and this ambitious, offering windows into their stories that only music can provide.
This gallery was initially published August 28, 2023, and has since been updated. It contains additional contributions from Bill Desowitz and Ryan Lattanzio.
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“Barbie”
Image Credit: ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection It’s hard to untangle the score from the music of “Barbie,” but that’s entirely by design. Composers Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt cleverly adapt the music tracks of Barbie Land to find both the fun and feelings that reach us in the Real World. There’s a wonderful emotional continuity to creating underscore in this way, so that by the time we finally hear Billie Eilish sing “What Was I Made For?” we’ve already had a number of moments throughout the film where Barbie’s (Margot Robbie) longing for connection and humanity has been musically expressed in the same way. Ronson and Wyatt also find connections that only the music can make to unite the Real World and Barbie-Land throughout the film, bringing Will Ferrel and his Mattel execs down to the Ken size by giving them a theme from Barbie’s dance party. The score blends orchestra and electronic beats to define the Greta Gerwig film’s sense of fun just as much as the sets, costumes, and colors do. — Sarah Shachat
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“Beau Is Afraid”
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection It would almost take as long to describe the feeling of Bobby Krlic’s score for “Beau Is Afraid” as it would to break down what happens in the Ari Aster surrealist odyssey. Krlic mines the cellos and violas he uses across each act of the film for everything from dread to disassociation to dreams, and achieves a sound that seems like a throwback to the lush scores of Franz Waxman and Bernard Hermann even as it embraces more modern play with atonality and atmosphere. Krlic’s score is a force throughout the film, making the emotion of each scene clear even if Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) doesn’t have a clue where he is or what’s going on. The Haxan Cloak producer weaves subtle sounds and motifs into each change the score makes across the acts of the film, too; it is music, as much as anything else, that pulls Beau towards the film’s ending. —SS
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“The Boy and the Heron”
Image Credit: GKIDS Joe Hisaishi’s work on “The Boy and the Heron” is steeped in Studio Ghibli history — not the least because some of it pulled from work the longtime Studio Ghibli composer did for Ghibli Park in Japan as well as a tune composed for director Hayao Miyazaki’s birthday. Hisaishi plays the main theme, “Ask Me Why,” on the piano each time it appears; and there is this sense — in the simplicity, clarity, and spacing in which Hisaishi’s notes feel like they ripple out into the universe — of the music being as personal as the animation. Which is not to say that “The Boy and the Heron” can’t get big or sweeping or grand or silly or surprising. It runs the full gamut of everything the film has to throw at the audience. But if Hisaishi proves anything with this possible last entry into his Studio Ghibli collaborations, it’s that it doesn’t necessarily take a lot to make us feel a lot. The right melody on just piano and strings can hit like an arrow to the heart (and/or beak). — SS
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“Chevalier”
Image Credit: ©Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection “Chevalier” wouldn’t work if Kris Bowers’ and Michael Abels’ score didn’t. The film explores the life of Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-George, and the extraordinary life he tries to carve out for himself in the waning days of (the still quite racist!) ancien regime France; as such there’s a great deal of virtuosic on-camera violin and chamber orchestra, which Abels executes by melding Bologne’s surviving work and the strictures of classical music with a modern viewer’s ear for how melodies repeat, develop, and bleed off of plaintive strings. The climactic “Sinfonie Liberté” is a moving synthesis of these, as lush as it is powerful. Meanwhile, Bowers’ work is as far-ranging as Bologne’s passions; at times, the score is atmospheric and brooding, and at times it soars to emotional highs. Music is core to Bologne’s journey and to “Chevalier,” and there is likely no higher praise than to say that the film’s score is worthy of its subject. —SS
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“The Creator”
Image Credit: ©20th Century Studios/Courtesy Everett Collection Director Gareth Edwards was so intent on getting a Hans Zimmer-like score for his sci-fi thriller about the war between humanity and AI that he asked an unspecified music company to use an AI program to compose an experimental track in the style of Zimmer. The result was less than perfect, so he moved on. Fortunately, when Oscar-winning “Dune” editor Joe Walker signed on early to work on the film, he was able to leverage his relationship with Zimmer to get him on board as the composer (along with partner Steve Mazzaro). The musical result is very much in keeping with Edwards’ indie/blockbuster hybrid ethos and very different from the usual Zimmer scores. It’s organic, orchestral, and choral, which predominantly evokes the emotional bond between hardened ex-special forces assassin Joshua (John David Washington) and his target: the powerful AI simulant Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). The most noteworthy cues explore Joshua’s anger (“She’s Not Real”), his strong connection with Alphie (“Heaven”), and spiritual rebirth (“True Love”). —Bill Desowitz
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“Eileen”
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection “Arcade Fire” member and composer Richard Reed Parry is a fixture of the 2023 winter film season with scores for Sean Durkin’s wrestling family tragedy “The Iron Claw” and William Oldroyd’s perverse queer noir “Eileen.” Oldroyd was so taken with Parry’s work on Durkin’s “The Nest” that he tasked the Canadian indie rocker with scoring his Ottessa Moshfegh adaptation set during a cold, lonely winter in 1964 Massachusetts. The resulting soundtrack amply abets the movie’s toxic pull as Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie’s characters embark on a dangerous drive toward desire and death. A jazzy, lilting woodwind theme ripples across the score’s 18 tracks to track the characters’ evolving attraction, with ominous electronic and orchestral arrangements shivering throughout. The discordant overlapping brasses on “Office Car Fantasy” evoke what it feels like to get lost in someone else’s orbit, as McKenzie’s prison secretary Eileen lays her head down on psychologist Rebecca’s (Anne Hathaway) desk, drifting into uncertain feeling. But Parry’s soundtrack, even at its most experimental, has a constantly forward-moving pep in its step, delivering a haunting album that stands on its own apart from the film. —Ryan Lattanzio
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“Fast X”
Image Credit: ©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection Composer Brian Tyler first began working on the “Fast and Furious” series with the franchise’s inaugural installment in 2001, and in the 22 years since that film was released, his scores for the movies have grown bolder and more ambitious with each new chapter. Appropriately for the biggest and most expansive “Fast” yet, Tyler’s score for “Fast X” is his most audacious, complex, and memorable to date, a spectacular combination of disparate genres and styles that somehow coheres into a unified tone. As the casts have grown bigger in each “Fast” movie, Tyler’s challenges have multiplied as well; here, he composes a multitude of distinct themes and motifs associated with different characters and storylines and pulls them together in a richly textured score characterized by both epic sweep and intimate emotional moments. Incorporating aspects of hip-hop, EDM, metal, industrial and other forms, Tyler provides a sonic landscape as visceral and overpowering as the movie’s over-the-top spectacle, anchored by a traditional orchestra that pulsates with modern energy. —Jim Hemphill
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“A Haunting In Venice”
Image Credit: ©Walt Disney Co./Courtesy Everett Collection “A Haunting In Venice” is as classic a mystery as they come, so it seems only right that composer Hildur Guðnadóttir dipped into the classic sound of a chamber score for this latest Kenneth Branagh mystery. But Guðnadóttir’s embrace of depth, darkness, experimentation with tone, and interplay between sound and silence is just as entrancing here as it has been in her more digitally composed work. The score acts almost as an audible manifestation of the characters’ doubts and fears, conveying dread and loss they don’t themselves have the words for. If Guðnadóttir’s music were as key a clue into the mind of Hercule Poirot as Branagh’s acting, that would be enough for any film score. But “A Haunting In Venice” finds a whole other gear in its coverage of “The Seance” and the “Psychic Pain” of Poirot afterward, too. Guðnadóttir sets the film’s mournful scene and then yanks it into an unnerving atonality that will make you believe in ghosts. —SS
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“Killers of the Flower Moon”
Image Credit: ©Apple TV/Courtesy Everett Collection The late, great Robbie Robertson’s final collaboration with Martin Scorsese is his best, a score that is rousing, contemplative, angry, and mournful in equal measures. Drawing on his own Native American heritage to merge modern electronics with more traditional instruments to come up with a sound unlike any in any other film, Robertson finds the perfect aural corollary for Scorsese’s tonally audacious Western; just as the movie encompasses irreconcilable and tragic contradictions, Robertson’s score manages to be simultaneously aggressive and spiritual in its effects. The drums and shakers that weave in and out of the score are an invaluable aid to the film’s pacing, making it feel far shorter than its 3-and-a-half hours thanks to a percussive foundation that thrusts the characters forward toward their inexorable fate. —JH
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“Knock at the Cabin”
Image Credit: ©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection M. Night Shyamalan’s latest is an apocalyptic thriller set almost entirely in the confines of a small cabin occupied by just a handful of characters, which raises an interesting filmmaking challenge: How does one create a sense of epic sweep when the camera barely leaves one room? One essential component in the case of “Knock at the Cabin” is the elegant and nerve-shredding orchestral score by Herdís Stefánsdóttir, which honors the end-of-the-world anxiety that Shyamalan’s script generates while also subtly underlining the film’s more intimate moments. The movie has a lot of risky tonal shifts, but Stefánsdóttir’s music unifies them in a way that makes “Knock at the Cabin” Shyamalan’s most satisfying movie in years; the aggressive, thundering string section anchors a horror score that both invites and earns comparison with the best of Bernard Herrmann while nimbly transitioning into themes of aching poignancy as the characters are faced with unimaginably difficult moral decisions. Shyamalan has always walked a razor’s edge between horror and sentiment, but in “Knock at the Cabin,” he pushes it further than ever before; that the balance is so successful is due in no small part to Herdís Stefánsdóttir. —JH
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“Oppenheimer”
Image Credit: ©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection There’s a metaphor, probably, in how tight one has to wind a violin string in order to play it properly. J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the character as imagined by Christopher Nolan in “Oppenheimer,” is a man perched at a violent juncture between beauty and horror, curiosity and arrogance, where the one constant throughout his life is the tension within himself. Ludwig Göransson’s score literalizes that tension and also blows it up. Göransson places electronic distortions, pounding percussion, and howling synths onto the soundtrack with scientific accuracy. Even without the tell-tale ticking so many Nolan scores use in their key moments of fusion (and fission), Göransson’s orchestrations provide the epic emotional scope of nuclear physics, even when all we’re seeing is guys talking in a room. Göransson applies the same rhythmic arcs, building and building until they unravel, to the more intimate, relationship-focused cues, too; that allows the score, even more than either the subjective or objective presentations of the story, to provide us with the best sense of who Oppenheimer really was. —SS
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“Past Lives”
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Director Celine Song knew the kind of music she didn’t want to have scoring “Past Lives.” A movie that is about tentative approaches over long distances, messy, interior longings and paths not taken across our lives all resist the manipulation of a big score, one where sweeping strings and cloying leitmotifs could drown out the emotion on the characters’ faces. But composers Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen lighted on exactly the kind of score the film needed. A fresh blend of guitars, winds, loose snares, and bells all create a very tactile musical language for “Past Lives.” The instruments together evoke the sense almost of wind blowing past, giving the film an even further specificity of place as it focuses on its two childhood sweethearts’ reunion in New York City. And very few movies’ scores earn a plaintive piano track the way that “Past Lives” does: The film’s ending is carried through the momentum of Bear and Rossen’s composition, such that we feel all the feelings of Hae Sung’s (Teo Yoo) departure, and the release of it, too. —SS
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“The Pigeon Tunnel”
Image Credit: Apple Documentarian Errol Morris had worked with composers Philip Glass and Paul Leonard-Morgan separately — Glass has been an integral part of Morris’ films for over 30 years now — but for “The Pigeon Tunnel” he brought them together to collaborate on the most ambitious and satisfying score in a Morris project since Glass’ work on “The Thin Blue Line.” The movie is nearly wall-to-wall music, as Glass and Leonard-Morgan riff on everything from the jazzy soundtracks of ’60s spy flicks to more sweeping orchestral influences in an attempt to find a sonic corollary for the complexity of Morris’ subject, author and former spy David Cornwell (better known under his pen name of John le Carré). Like the life story the movie covers, the score alternates between the intimate and the epic, giving a musical voice to the secrets Cornwell hints at but prefers not to articulate. —JH
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“Poor Things”
Image Credit: ©Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection “Poor Things” composer Jerskin Fendrix’s solo work mixes the flourishes of classical piano with cutting, observational lyrics and rhythms that zag instead of zig. But there is a humor, surprise, irreverence, and sudden, gaping depth to Fendrix’s sound that was a perfect fit for director Yorgos Lanthimos’s first foray into a custom score for one of his films. Fendrix used a battery of woodwinds and synthesized, breathy vocal samples that animate the strange, steampunk world of “Poor Things” just as much as the film’s staggering production design and costumes. More than that, Fendrix’s instrumentation and rhythm choices craft the sense of someone who, like protagonist Bella Baxter, sees and feels so much while going on a journey to be able to articulate it. The score is a window into Bella’s mind — and in “Poor Things,” minds are most useful for both experimental and non-experimental purposes. —SS
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“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”
Image Credit: ©Sony Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection Superhero movie scores are as widespread as superhero movies themselves, but not since “Avengers: Endgame” has a film of this genre offered such distinct and powerful themes throughout as “Across the Spider-Verse.” Daniel Pemberton’s score makes masterful use of repetition, repurposing the main theme throughout its over 30 tracks and adding motifs like the eerie canon disruption notes that make you feel like you’re watching the movie when you listen to the soundtrack. The Indian flair in Pavitr Prabhakar’s sections (Karan Soni) veers a little too close to stock music but still comes out more successful than most non-South Asian attempts at recreating Indian instrumental music (think of it as the multiverse version of those sounds). The album alone makes a case for seeing this movie again on the biggest screen possible, with Dolby surround sound and that music thrumming right in your seat. —Proma Khosla
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“Suzume”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Crunchyroll “Suzume” director Makoto Shinkai has collaborated with Japanese rock band RADWIMPS before — notably on his other disaster-inflected love stories “Your Name” and “Weathering With You.” But this third road trip across Japan (plus a magical tectonic plane of land and ancestor spirits) feels like the culmination of something they’ve been working towards, something that is soulful and longing and contemporary as much as it is orchestral and massive as the mountains of Japan itself. The contributions of composer Kazuma Jinnouchi tip the balance of the score slightly towards orchestra and chorus, big horns and strings getting even bigger during the action cues; but the most exciting moments of the soundtrack are all the small, subtle ways the music gives voice to the awe and grief and love that Suzume (Nanoka Hara) finds in the places she travels. There’s a power and a lovely momentum no matter what gear the “Suzume” soundtrack shifts into, and the triumphant final chorus of “Kantala Haluka” paired with the film’s ending is about as magical a pairing as movie and song ever get to have. —SS
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“The Zone of Interest”
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Usually we talk about films as a whole having a point of view or a perspective on the story they’re telling; it’s rare for a film’s soundscape to have a wholly separate point of view, but that’s exactly what Mica Levy and Jonathan Glazer pull off with “The Zone of Interest.” Levy’s score is sparring but essential. The film opens in total darkness, and for an extended period all we have is the soundtrack to settle us into the film in the way only Levi, Glazer, and sound designer Johnnie Burn would; the music grabs the audience by the lapels with a dizzying, dissonant series of sounds which are simultaneously indescribable and chillingly comprehensible, in view of the millions of lives which will end in terror, unseen, just beyond the walls of Auschwitz Commandant Rudulf Höss’s (Christian Friedel) idyllic home. Levi yes-ands Burn’s work, giving “The Zone of Interest” a hellish chorus of processed voices at key moments. We fill in the meaning and the violence of it ourselves, and that i what makes the film’s horror so much worse. — SS
