Good ones! I’ll also add Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Field of Dreams has one of my favorite scores of all time.
The Requiem music was only used in the advertisements for LOTR:TTT, but not in the movie itself though, right?
I liked Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Dances With Wolves has a beautiful score. I buy very few score soundtracks, but I own this one.
The Right Stuff is my all-time favorite movie and has an awesome score.
And I have to agree that the music in The Last of the Mohicans is amazing.
Also very good are Batman (89) and The Incredibles.
Let us not forget Psycho. One of the only films scored entirely for strings.
And that includes the shower scene.
Yup, all 3 LoTR scores were original (and Howard Shore walked away with Oscars for the 1st & 3rd installments)
Some of my favorites:
Big Fish
Chocolat
March of the Penguins
The Truman Show
Johan Soderqvist’s score for “Let the Right One In” is best described as heartbreakingly beautiful.
I also like the soundtrack album for “Team America”. Not just the hilarious songs, but the action-adventure instrumental score which doesn’t so much send up those kind of scores as much as it improves on them.
Any of Bernard Herrmann’s magnificent scores is fine with me.
And the soundtrack album for “Once” is usually in heavy rotation around here.
Regardless of how un-manly I am to admit this, I absolutely love the score to Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.
“The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain”
“Emma”
“Out of Africa”
Damn right. It doesn’t get much better than this.
It’s my favorite, too, but I have to admit that the score borrows heavily from Holst’s The Planets.
Funny, I clicked on this thread to nominate Kill Bill, and of course you had it in the OP already! Then after reading Archives post, I was gonna respond exactly as you did.
I am disapointed for some reason, also, to learn that none of it was original. I was so certain that the hand clappy beat that plays before O-Ren and Black Mamba get it on in the garden was some Original Rza that I was shaking with excitement when I first heard it.
And of course the beat that plays as O Ren and her crew turns the corners in the hallways of the clube.
But that siren sound that plays all through the movie, I was pretty sure wasn’t original because it seems I vaguely remember it from some old blackspoitation flicks or something? Or Karate flicks? Either way, I love that siren so much, and one of my favorite dance hall artists, Vybz Kartel used it for his song Emergency. (youtube link).
As you can see, don’t get me to rambling about KB, because I can’t stop.
ETA: I also agree with Argent about There Will Be Blood. Chilling, awesome score.
Actually, it comes from the TV show Ironside.
Bernard Herrmann wrote a great score for Psycho. Another of my favorites Carter Burwell’s score for Fargo.
Well, if the official soundtrack album was fully representative of the work onscreen, I’d without doubt hand the prize to Bernard Herrmann for his stunning score for Taxi Driver. As it is, there’s some curious versions pieces on there too - I love them, but for example, the actual title music is all but missing. The ‘theme from taxi driver’ on the OST (whilst to me wonderful in its way) was memorably described by Danny Baker once as “Taxi Driver 2: Travis Goes to Hawaii”. Still, when listened to the music onscreen, I think Taxi Driver can’t be beaten - I adore the complex, haunting mix of the soulful/sleazy jazz mixed in with that haunting/menacing military type music. It just all sounds so fresh and powerful to me even now. There was a thread a while back about which celebrity deaths would you prevent and although I picked someone else, it seems tragic that Herrmann’s death (he died just after completing this score) almost certainly robbed the ages of unwritten beauty.
Very close runner up for me would be Herrmann again for his work on *Citizen Kane *which is an utterly essential part of that film’s success for me. But really, there’s so many wonderful Herrmann scores: Fahrenheit 451, the aforementioned Ghost & Mrs Muir, all of the Hitchock stuff, Obsession, The Snows of Kilimanjaro etc etc. and he always gave so much commitment to any project. If you ever watch the Twilight Zone TV episode"Walking Distance", it has a full Herrmann score that is just superb.
More recently I have loved Carter Burwell’s work for the Coens and for his work on Being John Malcovich - “Future Vessel” from that score is just so beautiful.
Also, just because there’s been fewer mentions of John Barry than I thought there might be, so many of his Bond scores are worth checking out - Goldfinger and OHMSS are my favourites but most of them have their fantastic moments.
Who also had music in Kill Bill, the whistling tune that plays in the scene where Darryl Hannah enters the hospital to kill the Bride.
Amadeus.
Now that guy could really write a piece of music.
I guess I’ll go ahead and be the guy that says Star Wars, especially the OT. For me, anyway, that music has really held up over the years.
Speaking of Kill Bill, I think the inclusion of The Lonely Shepherdwas genius. It’s by Zamfir! (You know, master of the pan flute) I never would have heard that song if it wasn’t for Tarentino. It’s so beautiful I had to learn it on guitar.