This article is part of IndieWire’s 2000s Week celebration. Click here for a whole lot more.
If the movies of the 2000s were defined by a period of violent transition (both onscreen and off), the music that was written for those movies captured the full sweep of that change — and the endless possibilities it allowed for in turn. The aughts were absent a single identifying element as strong to the decade as synths were to the ’80s or symphonic grandeur was to the ’90s, and to judge by our list of the period’s best scores it sounds like they might have been all the better for it.
On the one hand, the 2000s saw venerated masters like John Williams and Terence Blanchard deliver some of the greatest work of their careers, while journeyman like “Lord of the Rings” composer Howard Shore emerged into legendary status with a single suite of music that became as iconic as any in the history of cinema. On the other hand, the dominance of mini-majors like Focus Features and Sony Pictures Classics allowed newer sounds to gain major attention, as bands like Mogwai and Tindersticks were invited to expand the idea of what movie scores could be.
Most exciting of all were the iconoclasts who managed to split (or erase) the difference between those two sides of the spectrum, as notable musicians like Jonny Greenwood, Nick Cave, and Björk proved — not for the first time, but more emphatically than ever before — that generational musicians could discover new facets of their genius by surrendering it to the needs of another artist.
Here are our picks for the 30 best film scores of the 2000s.
This article features contributions from Christian Blauvelt, Jude Dry, David Ehrlich, Kate Erbland, Eric Kohn, Noel Murray, Michael Nordine, Chris O’Falt,and Adam Solomons.
30. “O Brother Where Art Thou?”
A movie inspired by the fictional movie within Preston Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travels” needs an equally inspired soundtrack, and the Coen Brothers sure got one with the help of producer T-Bone Burnett: This is the only film score on this list that also won the Grammy for Album of the Year. Burnett assembled country, Americana, and bluegrass musicians from Emmylou Harris to Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch. And of course, Dan Tyminski, Pat Enright, and Harley Allen, or The Soggy Bottom Boys, who George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson lip-synch to in the film, when they become radio stars. All of the songs this lineup sings are preexisting roots classics from the early 20th century, newly recorded with the utmost respect for the material (and a couple vintage records play on the soundtrack as well) and at all times helping to drive the story forward as Clooney, Turturro, and Nelson go on the run across the American South in the 1930s, having escaped from a chain gang.
The instrumentals on many of these are spare — you don’t need to ornament talent on this level — with “Didn’t Leave Nobody but the Baby” being a near a cappella harmony with Harris, Krauss, and Welch, “I’ll Fly Away” with just banjo and guitar, and “Down to the River to Pray” purely a cappella. It was a back-to-basics sound that defied the increasingly pop-friendly Nashville scene and felt fresh even as it repackaged ageless classics like a countrified “Moulin Rouge.” As one character says, “That was some mighty fine a-pickin’ and a-singin’.” —CB
29. “Volver” — Alberto Iglesias
The strongest musical moment in Pedro Almodovar’s “Volver” isn’t the score at all, but rather the use of a little-known British indie dance song. Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) is covertly visited by her mother Irene (Carmen Maura), who she thinks is dead, and in Irene’s pride in her daughter we hear “A Good Thing” by Saint Etienne. It’s dramatically euphoric and upbeat, albeit with Almodovar’s trademark themes of betrayal and misunderstanding laced throughout.
These are what Alberto Iglesias’s score are mostly there to punctuate. It begins as a straightforwardly Mediterranean arrangement, all Spanish guitar and fast violins, and could accompany a pulpy Mexican telenovela. Almodovar’s most audacious melodrama deals with reality TV and soap opera, and in parts feels like it too. Iglesias’s score is an important part of that gymnastics. Having scored all of Almodovar’s films since 1995’s “The Flower of My Secret”, Iglesias is now one of his most important collaborators. He reads Almodovar’s scripts and watches early versions, writing his music to match the performances delivered. It’s impossible to think of “Volver” without exactly the performance Penelope Cruz gives, but Iglesias’s score follows her every methodical move brilliantly. Maura’s rhythms are even harder to track, as her ghostly presence in Raimunda’s life is brought to life by an ominous oboe theme that evokes suspicion and disquiet. In “Volver” even more than other Almodovar films, mysteries are allowed to fester. Iglesias’s provocative score offers subtle hints at the truth without ever overreaching. It’s no surprise he has become as important to the director as one of his regular ensemble. —AS
28. “Howl’s Moving Castle” — Joe Hisaishi
“Howl’s Moving Castle” is one of Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki’s most complex films: a surreal fantasy that doubles as an anti-war statement, about a young woman using her wits and courage to navigate a world where capricious magicians alter reality on a whim. Joe Hisaishi’s score is suitably eclectic, ranging from the spooky to the rousing, with a fair amount of martial percussion and more than a few moments that wouldn’t sound out of place in an old-fashioned Hollywood action-adventure. But like Hisaishi’s other Ghibli soundtracks, what makes “Howl’s Moving Castle” so effective are the quietly lyrical moments, where the strings and woodwinds softly swell in concert, conveying the wistfulness and heartache of the central character. That sound also suffuses the song from the movie that became a hit, “Merry-Go-Round of Life” — a title that aptly describes Hisaishi’s aesthetic. —NM
27. “Friday Night Lights” — Explosions in the Sky
West Texas band Explosions in the Sky signed up to score “Friday Night Lights” when they were told it was a local story. Their music, mostly woozy electric guitar melodies best suited to slow-mo montages of sporting glories and failures, might not sound very Texan to someone not from there. But it is faithful to the specific Texas experience Peter Berg’s film depicts: under pressure of economic woes they can only half-understand but fully experience, the high schoolers in this story have the emotional health of their town on their back. The high-stakes and high-octane events on the field are well-suited to Explosions in the Sky’s faster tracks, while their slower, more reflective movements suit angsty locker room scenes and the off-field soap opera.
The final scene is a good example: as coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) dramatically swaps out the names on his board for next year’s crop and Mike Winchell (Lucas Black) tosses a ball out to some kids in the parking lot, we get the electric guitars, then marching band-style drums, then strings(!). It’s more than a little manipulative as scores go, but it’s pretty effective. Explosions in the Sky have discussed being offered more studio space and instruments to write the “Friday Night Lights” score, but chose to stick to their guns and record with their usual guitars. It’s striking and impressive that they were able to make a strong score that way. But its simplicity is also an important part of why Berg’s film was turned into such a pulpy show. —AS
26. “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” — Hans Zimmer
Hans Zimmer wasn’t the only one to underestimate “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Too busy scoring “The Last Samurai,” he handed Jerry Bruckheimer a junior composer on his team who had few film credits to their name. After “Pirates,” that would change, even if Hans Zimmer probably still gets more credit for producing the memorable score than its primary composer, Klaus Badelt. A total of nine composers ended up writing cues and motifs for “Curse of the Black Pearl,” but its signature sound was defined in just a few bars: A fast-paced and catchy main theme that has since become synonymous with the adventure film genre. The tune is so immense that it’s become hard to tell whether pirate movies have always sounded like this, or whether Badelt and Zimmer simply rewrote history forever.
On the other hand, it’s easy to forget the more sophisticated parts of the score, but they’re crucial to its overall success (the use of pan flutes, meant to evoke the supernatural and ancient myths of sexual temptation, do a lot of the heavy lifting). Meanwhile, Verbinski’s timing in using the score is impeccable: the first time we hear that distinct main tune, it’s when Jack Sparrow is being fired upon. It’s paused midway through battle sequences to maximize the tension, and has to coexist with some pretty grand sound effects just to be heard. Badelt and Zimmer’s music is one of the most recognizable of its decade and has helped define the sound of the decade’s cinema. It’s a fitting accompaniment to the sort of movie we don’t make anymore — even if the franchise looks to be getting a ghost ship-worthy resurrection soon. —AS
25. “Solaris” — Cliff Martinez
Truly a sci-fi score for the “Kid A” era, Cliff Martinez’s minimalist music for Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s classic novel presents space as a hopeless desert. If Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) could hear the slow synths as he sits on the train or walks purposefully around the space station orbiting Solaris, he’d be even lonelier. All that punctuates Martinez’s main theme in the first half of “Solaris” are metallic percussive sounds that could be spanners hitting the outside of the ship. In fact the most important feature on the soundtrack of “Solaris” is probably Soderbergh’s decidedly liberal use of white noise: technology is as ubiquitous as it is unexciting. That along with Martinez’s score evokes machine noises and tools at work. This is not space as the final frontier. It’s space as an out-of-state business trip.
Once we realize why Kelvin has gone on his adventure and meet the demons who have haunted him (and, it turns out, still do), the music changes but the fundamental themes remain. The prominent love theme, which plays over sex scenes between Kelvin and Rheya (Natascha McElhone), is more pleasant and major-key than what we’ve been hearing. Theirs was a warm love. But the electronic staccato sounds that punctuate it are a reminder how clinical and artificial their love now is. We never see Chris and Rheya’s love story in real time, only via flashbacks. Martinez’s score is a moving backdrop to a relationship that ultimately destroyed both of those involved in it. The music loses a touch of its specificity as the film goes on, but in its early evocation of the banality of space and the love story that makes “Solaris” so interesting, Martinez accomplished quite the feat. —AS
24. “Cowboy Bebop: The Movie” — Yoko Kanno
The music that Yoko Kanno composed for “Cowboy Bebop” the television show is so, so, SO extraordinary and iconic that her work on “Cowboy Bebop: The Movie” — and, by extension, the movie itself — probably can’t help but feel like a paltry encore by comparison. It’s unfortunate, because the movie is (slightly) more than just a feature-length “Cowboy Bebop” episode, and the original music that Kanno wrote for it epitomizes how thoughtfully “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (as it was known in Japan) iterates on the jazz-fusion genius of the anime series.
Fronting her band Seatbelts, Kanno riffed on the wild blend of musical styles that made the show feel like something people had never seen or heard before, complementing a suite of vintage “Bebop” tunes like the frenzied “What Planet Is This?!” with Arabic-influenced songs like “Musawe,” a cool percussive groove layered under a soft canopy of vocals from Moroccan artist Hassan Bohmide. The former anchors the score in the same impossible cool of the series, while the latter reflects the North African flavor that helped give the movie its own identity. Meanwhile, tracks like the spiraling “Dijurido” lent the feature a symphonic richness that the show couldn’t really afford for all of its cool pathos. If the movie had been as ambitious as the music written for it, it might have had a chance at becoming as iconic as the space-noir that inspired it. —DE
23. “Atonement” — Dario Marianelli
Dario Marianelli’s Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning score cleverly bridges the gap between historical necessities and the addition of unexpected flourishes that speak directly to the material at hand. Punctuated by ticking typewriters and dazzlingly piano (dazzling to the point of terror and confusion, quite honestly), the work easily stands alone as one of Marianelli’s most accomplished and unique works yet, but when paired with the wrenching content of Joe Wright’s film, it speaks to the power the unspools when film and score are perfectly joined. Look no further (listen no further?) than to “Briony,” which seamlessly weaves together piano and typewriter into a heart-stopping song that wavers between excitement and curiosity, discovery and fear, without literally missing a beat. It’s the movie in miniature, something you want to kick your feet to before it suddenly, abruptly ends — because it has to. —KE
22. “Punch-Drunk Love” — Jon Brion
Both Guillermo Del Toro and Bong Joon-ho have referred to this film as being like one long piece of music, yet what’s interesting is that it’s never how one would refer to Jon Brion’s “Punch-Drunk Love” score itself. Reflecting the fractured internal state of Barry (Adam Sandler), Brion at times takes sounds effects and turns them into music that emphasizes how out of control our hero can feel. When combined with Paul Thomas Anderson’s camera movement and Sandler’s nervous ticks, the music externalizes the raging storm inside Barry in a way that is pure cinematic magic. Yet even at its most chaotic and disjointed, there is a circus-like playfulness to the score which can effortlessly glide into the melody, romance and inner peace Emily Watson’s Lena brings to Barry. —CO
21. “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith” — John Williams
If there’s a moment you can pinpoint to show the difference between the George Lucas aesthetic and that of the “Star Wars” stuff made after him, it comes about a third of the way into “Revenge of the Sith,” when the fiendish cyborg General Grievous is flying a shuttle, having escaped the Jedi. It’s 56 seconds of just his ship flying toward the planet Utapau, entering the atmosphere, then landing on a platform, with the General emerging in front of several of his cohorts, then walking to a room where he dials up a holographic Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid). It’s basically like an interlude in an opera, a chance to catch your breath, reorient yourself to your surroundings, and let the universe breathe a bit. And of course, it’s carried by John Williams’ extraordinary music, so powerful that it justifies this scene, even though nothing really happens in it. It crescendos, once the General has landed, into a full-blown chorus chanting a “Dies Irae”-like wail — adding choral voices is the defining feature of Williams’ “Star Wars” prequel scores, separating them markedly from the original trilogy.
There’s simply no interlude sequence like this in any of the “Star Wars” material to follow in its wake, no chance to just let this galaxy far, far away “be” for a bit. No flair when moving the sets around on-stage, so to speak. Not that there hasn’t still been fine Williams material (especially in “The Last Jedi”), but “Revenge of the Sith” is special for just how perfectly Williams’ music lines up with Lucas’s vision and propels the story at key moments. There’s the dirge-like opera Palpatine and Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) attend, which basically sounds like Sardaukar from the later “Dune” movies. The reprise of Qui-Gon’s funeral chorus for Padmé’s funeral and Anakin’s transformation into Darth Vader (the way previous themes return in “Revenge of the Sith” makes it the most Wagnerian of this very Wagnerian saga). And a fantastic leitmotif for General Grievous himself: When he makes his debut in the film, it’s only tubas that play, followed by a sharp thud of a bass drum. It’s cartoonish, but somehow genuinely menacing too, just like the character. And all the more resonant for this time in our own galaxy where cartoonishness and villainy have also gone hand in hand, with devastating results. —CB
20. “The Duchess” — Rachel Portman
One of the great composers of orchestral film music the past 30 years, Rachel Portman deserves even more praise than the Oscar she received for the score for 1996’s “Emma.” Her work is always a conduit to pure emotion (hello, “Only You,” with the greatest score for a summer-holiday-in-Italy movie ever), bathed in luscious strings, inquisitive woodwinds, and introspective piano. “The Duchess” is a swooningly romantic and tragic film, perfect for her sensibility.
Directed by Saul Dibb, the movie itself is only okay — its marketing campaign, comparing the story of the 18th Century aristocrat Georgiana Cavendish, the Duchess of Devonshire, to Princess Diana, right down to the use of Diana’s famous line “There were three people in our marriage,” was in poor taste — but elevated by Portman’s remarkable symphonic reverie of a score.
Portman drew on late 18th century composers — Mozart, Haydn, and Hummel in particular — for a distinctly classical-bordering-on-romantic sound that she pushed in the latter direction by going a little modern: Employing sudden tempo changes, wave-like crescendos of the orchestra in full, and a violin with a prominent solo part playing the melody over the rest of the orchestra on tracks like “G and Grey Together in Bath.” The violin here serves the function of the clarinet in “Only You,” a musical instrument as avatar for the film’s main character, unearthing her feelings and putting them on display for us all to experience and empathize with. This is music as subjectivity, and a supreme example of Portman’s gift: Marshaling the power of a full orchestra to achieve an intimate understanding of a singular human life. —CB
19. “The Hours” — Philip Glass
You’d be hard-pressed to find a contemporary composer more suited to scoring a movie about Virginia Woolf than Philip Glass. Both pioneers of the avant-garde, Woolf’s prose can sometimes be as opaque as Glass’s cyclical compositions. Where Woolf found life in the banalities of daily life, Glass finds beauty from repetition. Both artists leave an indelible imprint on the reader or listener. Ironically, the score to Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours” represents some of Glass’s most accessible work, favoring delicate melodies over droning cacophonies. Each refrain swells into a cascade of ideas, a musical representation of the inside of Woolf’s troubled and brilliant mind. —JD
18. “Mulholland Dr.” — Angelo Badalamenti
Angelo Badalamenti delivered scores of ethereal mood and menace for David Lynch before, with his work on “Blue Velvet,” “Twin Peaks,” and “Wild at Heart.” And there had been moments of spirituality there too: in “Sandy’s Dream” from “Blue Velvet” and “Major Briggs’ Dream” from “Twin Peaks.” But never had he combined the transcendent and the terrifying quite the way he did in “Mulholland Drive.” Take the scene where Laura Harring’s Camilla leads Naomi Watts’s Diane up “a secret path”: Badalamenti’s synths initially meander in a lazy melody that twists like roads on the Hollywood Hills, then crescendos into cascading waves of emotion. Like all of Diane’s greatest hopes and dreams are about to be fulfilled as she takes this journey up the hillside with the woman she loves.
Of course, it’s a false promise. And it’s a theme that’s repeated to close the movie when those dreams are shattered. But it’s still so beautiful, just as Hollywood can create beauty even if many of the dreams it peddles are lies. In Badalamenti’s hands, synths have never been so warm, so haunting. And his work elevates Lynch’s film so that the entire movie is not at all about “the rotten core beneath a glittering, idyllic surface,” the way “Blue Velvet” and several of this other works are. “Mulholland Drive” is more nuanced. The beauty and the ugliness here are one and the same, not just separate inhabitants of a shared space.
Badalamenti died in 2022, and his Lynch compositions are probably his greatest legacy. But though thought of as an “arthouse” composer, it’s amazing to remember how much mainstream work he actually did: The soundtrack to “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and the main theme for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, among them. Hey, maybe that awareness of the mainstream is how he was also able to conjure up a decent jitterbug track to open “Mulholland Drive.” Regardless, he delivered a score for Lynch’s masterpiece that shows that arthouse provocations and swelling emotion can fit together as perfectly as little blue keys in little blue boxes. —CB
17. “Gladiator” — Lisa Gerard & Hans Zimmer
Undeniably one of the most stirring blockbuster scores of the century to date, “Gladiator” works so well as a piece of music less because of its originality (it isn’t that original) than because of Zimmer’s savvy fusion of different musical influences onto a framework that’s basically straight out of the late 1950s or early ‘60s. And “Gladiator,” save for some increased gore and CGI, really could have been a sword-and-sandal epic going up against, say, “Ben-Hur” for Best Picture: It’s based on a 1958 novel, Daniel Mannix’s “Those About to Die” (which also just became a Peacock series), and has a startlingly similar story to 1964’s “Fall of the Roman Empire.” At times, the music Zimmer wrote for it — with its doubled-up French horns and choir providing the main heroic theme, or the full orchestral wash of the “Patricide” scene — sounds like it could have been Miklos Rosza or Dimitri Tiomkin’s contribution to a William Wyler or Anthony Mann-directed version of this film.
But Zimmer zigs when you expect him to zag and adds some Eastern flavors to his musical palette, particularly collaborator Lisa Gerrard’s “wailing woman” vocals — inspiring an entire trend — on the track “Elysium” and her playing of a yangqin, a Chinese hammered dulcimer, on several tracks. It expresses the global grasp of the Roman Empire, which by the time of the mid 2nd century events of the film, really was as cosmopolitan as the mélange of musical influences here would suggest, even as it’s also music that’s the stuff (many) figure skating routines are made of. And get a load of that Spanish guitar on the track “The Battle” to establish that Russell Crowe’s character is indeed from Hispania. Somehow it all works, though, a stirring hodgepodge that hangs together despite being made up of incongruous parts — much like the Roman Empire itself. —CB
16. “Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait” — Mogwai
More an art installation than a conventional documentary portrait, “Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait” is an oddly transfixing way to watch a soccer game. Contemporary visual artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno filmed one of the best players to grace the pitch with 17 cameras as he played what should have been a routine home match for Spanish titans Real Madrid against — well — non-titans Villareal. Gordon and Parreno’s film seeks to show that the “Magician from Marseilles” was anything but. Every move seems carefully calibrated. All that exceeds its gracefulness is its thoughtfulness.
Scottish rock band Mogwai share the stage with crowd noise and even the sound of Zidane’s feet tapping the grass. Their low-key, meandering instrumentals offer some zen to the chaos of the on-pitch proceedings and the 80,000 spectators (Spanish soccer fans aren’t quiet). More interestingly perhaps, they lend an angst to Zidane’s play. He controls the game from the centre, but he’s the most carefully watched (and fouled) by the opposition. But playing in the centre and constantly seeking options can be a lonely existence. When Zidane has the opportunity to scrap with an opponent, he takes it. He even takes opportunities to fight that didn’t previously exist.
Zidane’s most memorable moment on a soccer pitch was his sending off in the World Cup final against Italy in 2006, all but costing his team the match and the tournament. It’s apt that Gordon and Parreno’s film ends with the same fate for Zidane — a red card — earned needlessly in injury time at the very end of the game. Mogwai’s score here is at its least personal, just vibrating noise that appears to channel the angry chaos in its subject’s head. Like the player it’s named after, “Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait” is oddly transfixing and compellingly unpredictable. —AS
15. “25th Hour” — Terence Blanchard
“25th Hour” was never meant to be a 9/11 movie. Written in 2000, David Benioff’s novel about a drug dealer facing seven years upstate was actually inspired by a stint in a Manhattan hospital. Benioff described being in the city but not part of it — haunting it like a ghost. Spike Lee’s adaptation of Benioff’s book has that same central idea, but Terrence Blanchard’s swelling overture is the first clue that Lee has bigger things to say, too. It’s a grand horn motif that, along with the lights shining out from Ground Zero and dramatic nighttime shots of Manhattan, paint New York as a city in need of a hero. Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) may be the hero it deserves, but he’s decidedly not the one it needs.
Vocals from Algerian singer Cheb Mami, which sound like a call to prayer, appear to summon those responsible for New York’s destruction. It’s bold, even jarring: the musical equivalent of the famed Bin Laden “Wanted: Dead or Alive” New York Post front page that pops up time and again. Brogan isn’t a great guy, and probably deserves a few years in prison for helping ruin vulnerable people’s lives. But Blanchard’s score reminds us that there’s evil out there. (The members of the Academy who didn’t even nominate this score deserve more than seven years behind bars, by the way.)
The icing on the cake is what Blanchard does to Bruce Springsteen’s already-great “The Fuse”, which plays in a modified form in the end credits. Punctuating Bruce’s dark and disillusioned singing are Blanchard’s signature horns: Spike asked for something “Sgt Pepper-esque”, and got it. It’s creative and counterintuitive and, like the rest of Blanchard’s work on “25th Hour”, makes Lee’s film greater than the sum of its parts. —AS
14. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” — Jon Brion
When people think about the music from “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Jon Brion’s score might not be the first thing that comes to mind. Not when Electric Light Orchestra’s “Mister Blue Sky” became forever associated with it because of the marketing campaign alone, and Beck’s gorgeously wistful “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime” was used to perfection over the story’s closing moments. Rewatch the film, however, and you’ll find that Jon Brion’s woozy score does all of the heavy lifting. Waltzing along the fine line between preciousness and profundity, Brion’s lilting piano theme perfectly echoes the tone of a beguiling romance that — by design — struggles to find a balance in its feelings.
Playful when it needs to be at the start, heartbreakingly poignant as the film goes on, and as queasy as falling in love throughout, Brion’s score gives Michel Gondry’s film the permission it needs to get lost in its own thoughts. That ineffable magic is best epitomized by “Phone Call,” which is one of the fuzziest and most beautiful iterations on Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th” you’ll ever hear, and — like so much of the music in this movie — absolutely impossible to get out of your head. —DE
13. “Trouble Every Day” — Tindersticks
How abstract can you make a horror movie that’s still visceral and sensual as well? That’s Claire Denis’ mission in “Trouble Every Day” and one that she conveyed perfectly to English alt-rock band Tindersticks on their second scoring effort for the French director (they had previously scored 1996’s “Nenette et Boni”). For the opening scene, in which a couple makes out in a car, singer Stuart A. Staples croons the title track, with some café jazz accompaniment: Bass, piano, and lightly tapped high-hat. Then the strings come in, a full orchestral section that pops up again with the same melody on the track “Killing Theme.” Sex and murder are connected from the start in this musical vision.
But rather than be overpowering, the music is soft and supple: It’s there to set the mood, to draw you in, not add to any jump scares. Long pauses with no music at all punctuate “Room 321,” where a muted trumpet recalls rain-slicked streets and long-slow drags of a cigarette. It’s like Miles Davis’s “Elevator to the Gallows” score given a minimalist deprogramming. Never mind Il Jazz Hot, this is Il Jazz Cool. And that’s even before you get to “Maid Theme,” which is literally just three chords on a harp lightly repeated. For the life of me, I think it’s the same three chords underlying The Coup’s “Pork and Beef,” another musical masterpiece from 2001. That’s the power of Tindersticks’ work on its own as well as in the film. Music this simple and stripped down will always have connections to previous material. But as much as Tindersticks’ work might sound familiar, it’s irreducibly original in the end. —CB
12. “Catch Me if You Can” — John Williams
John Williams is so much more than just one thing: For all the hummable anthems and blasts of fanfare he’s delivered across “Superman,” “Star Wars,” “Indiana Jones,” and “E.T.” he’s delivered scores that go against the blockbuster grain he himself harvested. Exhibit A: his furtively fun music for “Catch Me if You Can,” which is as sneaky and sly as Leonardo DiCaprio’s con man Frank Abagnale, Jr. himself. This is not a hummable score — it’s a little too complex for that — but it’s still capable of getting under your skin almost immediately.
The main theme, called “Closing In,” starts off quiet, like a quick peek around a corner. A vibraphone and a xylophone play together one note and then four in quick, back and forth succession, almost like a major key version of the “Jaws” theme. The orchestra collectively vocalizes a “shh!” Then piano, flutes, and finger snaps join in. And finally an alto saxophone. It’s a pointillist peppering of new instruments into the mix, the melody going out and back on itself like a con man adding and deleting new features to a disguise. It’s a salad bowl kind of orchestration, the instruments too distinctly heard individually to really blend together — and then a bass cello joins the vibraphone and we’re in full-on Lionel Hampton mode. It could be a Frank DeVol score, but given the kind of scale that only Williams can bring. And once you hear it, it’ll steal right away into your brain forever. —CB
11. “Lady Vengeance” — Choi Seung-hyun
Park Chan-wook makes fiendishly elaborate and dazzlingly ornate genre exercises that flow with machine-like precision, and he often relies upon his composers to sustain those stories with enough centrifugal force that viewers get swept along by the current. 2005’s “Lady Vengeance” was — and arguably still is — Park’s most symphonic film, and in turn it demanded his most symphonic accompaniment. Needless to say, composer Choi Seung-hyun (working in tandem with “The Handmaiden” composer and Park mainstay Jo Yeong-wook) was more than up to the challenge.
Expanding on the Vivaldi influence that ran through “Oldboy,” Choi teased the film’s sharp and sawing baroque theme from the bones of “Ah ch’infelice sempre,” which he excerpted from a little-known cantata about a woman seeking revenge on the man who betrayed her — a natural starting point for Park’s drama about a wronged jailbird who gets out of prison and immediately launches into her master plan against the serial killer who stole her life away. The spirited flurry of harpsichords is as plucky and determined as Lee Geum-ja herself, but the music, perfectly in sync with a movie that grows darker with every scene (peep the “Fade to Black and White” version that visualizes that trajectory), assumes an increasingly minor tonality from there, as the harpsichords slow and give way to tumbling pianos that reflect the heroine’s unraveling poise. Without ever sacrificing the sheer velocity that keeps the story from derailing, Choi’s score creates a roiling sense of tumult; one that reflects Geum-ja’s ethos that “everything should be pretty,” but never shies away from the barbed wire underneath that immaculate facade. —DE
Continue to the next page to see our picks for the ten best movie scores of the 2000s.
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