20. “La La Land” (2016)
A collaboration between composer Jordan Hurwitz and the songwriting team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the songs from the original movie musical were inescapable from December 2016 through the Academy Awards at the end of February. Belted out by either stars Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling, or a people’s chorus, Hurwitz, Pasek, and Paul composed a jazz-influenced set of songs that could have been popular at the height of the classic MGM musicals. Highlights included “Another Day of Sun,” “Someone in the Crowd,” “City of Stars,” and “Audition (The Fools Who Dream).” John Legend‘s “Start a Fire” still feels out of place, but the others are borderline iconic enough that you can guarantee you’ll constantly hear one familiar refrain when LA hosts the Summer Olympics in 2028. – GE
19. “Gone Girl” (2014)
Throughout “Gone Girl,” David Fincher undercuts images of domestic bliss and suburban placidity with a kind of sinuous, deep-seated dread —even the scenes in “Gone Girl” that unfold in sunlight seem somehow dark and downcast. “Gone Girl” was misunderstood upon its release— many viewers saw it as a blackly comic thriller when it’s actually a thoroughly meta look at the cost of public infamy, and a squirm-inducing takedown of toxic male entitlement—but if one simple fact remains unassailable, it’s that the original score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross simply rips. Fincher has been working with these guys for a while now—they composed the Oscar-winning score to “The Social Network,” and the similarly ill-omened music for the director’s adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”— but this is one of their most definitive work to date. No one does brooding electronic soundscapes like Reznor and Ross: they’ve done outstanding work for films as varied in tone and execution as “Patriot’s Day” and also this year’s A24-produced melodrama “Waves.” Their songs for “Gone Girl” manage to elucidate on the themes of madness and decay that exist in Gillian Flynn’s novel, while lending the end result a sonic identity all its own. Plus they work in so much amazingly subtle texture and humor. It’s often difficult to tell who’s telling the truth in “Gone Girl” and sly sarcasm and insincerity slips in too, especially with any of the balmy music Fincher has sardonically referred to as “sauna music.” The creeping “Background Noise” is oh so much more than its title suggests, while “Technically, Missing” starts off low and slow, with twinkling keys and churning synths, before building to a crescendo of sustained, forceful madness. –NL
18. “Annihilation” (2018)
Alex Garland’s “Annihilation” might have just been another stock sci-fi adventure in any other director’s hands. Thankfully, Garland is one of our smartest purveyors of science fiction, which means that “Annihilation” owes a greater debt to Andrei Tarkovsky than “Predator” (no disrespect intended to John McTiernan’s 1987 original). The original motion picture soundtrack for “Annihilation,” featuring a procession of deeply disturbing original compositions by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, is every bit as unorthodox and disquieting as the film itself. It is haunting, unclassifiable work – the kind of stuff that feels as though it was siphoned from someone’s nightmares and then laid on wax. For every unexpected flourish in this collection – the mournful acoustic guitar of “The Watchtower,” the jangling ambient undulations of “The Alligator” – there’s a piece that is nothing less than stratospheric in its sonic ambition. It’s hard to capture the primeval majesty of “The Alien,” a twelve-minute behemoth that feels like watching a deceased loved one come back to reanimated life and speak to you in an alien tongue. It’s a yawn into the abyss, a howl of noise and clatter and shimmer (see what we did there?) that is, in a word, perfect. “Annihilation” is somehow sickly and exalted at the same time, buzzing with notes of fear and spectacular awe to the degree that it makes other avant-garde sci-fi movie soundtracks look feeble in comparison. Alex Garland is a genuine visionary, and with “Annihilation,” he’s helped put together what is unquestionably a visionary soundtrack. – NL
17. “Jackie” (2016)
The first sound we hear in “Jackie” is a string accompaniment tilting into something strange and atonal. It seems to be announcing to the audience: if you thought this was going to be a straightforward biopic with a similarly straightforward score, you came to the wrong movie. This makes sense when you consider that the composer behind “Jackie” is Mica Levi, the avant-garde trailblazer who gave us the ruinous alien soundscapes of “Under the Skin,” inarguably one of the most influential film scores of the last twenty years. Levi’s work for “Jackie” is just a shade more conventional than her contributions to Jonathan Glazer’s sinister science fiction landmark, but that’s not the same thing as saying it’s conventional, period. This is still a masterful perversion of how a period biopic soundtrack should sound: one that teems with the sorrow and deep subjectivity that befits the film’s subject. “Lee Harvey Oswald” employs those same tottering strings to magnificent effect, while “Graveyard” makes fine use of dire keys and military-style percussion and “Burial” manages to sound less like death than sonic rebirth. While watching “Jackie,” Levi’s score is never distracting, no matter how strange it gets. The sounds she summons are completely of a piece with Pablo Larraín’s similarly hard-to-classify film, evoking subterranean groundswells of panic and dread. This is a score that brilliantly subverts the musty template for the kind of movie “Jackie” should be in theory, tearing down an outmoded sonic template and constructing something new and frightening in its place. – NL
16. “Arrival” (2016)
It makes sense that the score for a film about communication that originates from beyond our terrestrial borders sounds like nothing else that has come before or after it. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score for Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival” sounds like it was beamed in from another galaxy, where the definition of music is broader and less restrictive. It’s less a series of musical compositions than a complete, from-the-ground-up reimagining of what film music can sound like. In that regard, Jóhannssonwas taking a page out of the playbook of fellow avant-garde composer Mica Levi, fashioning something daring and unprecedented out of existing parts. “Heptapod B” builds its dizzying rhythmic structure off a series of eerie chants – alien would be an easy descriptor here, but it’s also accurate. Elsewhere, “Hydraulic Lift” unfolds as one extended, hypnotic drone, while “Decyphering” takes harmonic trilling to trascendent new heights. Jóhannsson died far too young, leaving behind a staggering body of musical work that, quite frankly, speaks for itself. With scores for films like “Arrival” and 2018’s grindhouse throwback “Mandy,” Jóhannsson expanded the parameters of film composition, changing the way modern listeners think about movie music. We suspect that, like Mica Levi, Jóhannsson will set a considerable precedent for other modern composers to follow, having jettisoned the more outmoded or traditional elements of his trade and blazed considerable trails in the place of what once was. To put it plainly, Jóhannsson was a giant in the world of film music, and “Arrival”offers listeners some of his most enduring work. – NL
15. “Suspiria” (2018)
Bold claim time: we believe that the score for Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” – a succession of eerie, swooning, deeply creepy orchestral compositions by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke – is superior to the Goblin score for Dario Argento’s 1977 original. Okay, maybe there’s nothing as instantly iconic as Goblin’s titular theme song on the tracklist Yorke has assembled, but our assertion still stands. Guadagnino wasn’t content to just erect another stylized genrehomage with his 2018 reimagining of Argento’s most famous work, and the soundtrack follows suit: it is boldly, even defiantly, its own thing, which may alienate giallo purists who were simply looking forward to hearing an iteration of Goblin 2.0. This is music that writhes and seethes: some of the pieces here almost sound like what we imagine certain LPs sound like when played backwards, conjuring demonic incantations and spells not of this world. “A Soft Hand Across Your Face” is a terrifying ambient billow, while “Volk” – the album’s unholy pièce de résistance – summons levels of evil that will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Throughout, Yorke peppers these perturbed transpositions with unnerving and hypnotic original songs. “Open Again” feels like hearing a voice chirrup from the other side of a celestial void, while “Unmade” somehow manages to sound like an unreleased track from the “In Rainbows”/“Hail to the Thief” era while nevertheless being completely of a piece with Guadagnino’s film. Who knew the sounds of pure witchy malevolence could be this beautiful? – NL
14. “The Tree of Life” (2011)
Alexandre Desplat created a soundtrack that was as inimitable and impressionistic as its inspiration when he scored Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life.” This delicate score marries perfectly with Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s golden imagery. Vivacious, evocative tracks like “Circles” and “River” flow into more foreboding numbers like “Light & Darkness” and “Temptation,” tinkling piano giving way to solemn strings as the film itself grows darker. Mesmeric and full of pathos, it’s the kind of score that feels inextricable from the world of the film itself — daring enough to be memorable without overshadowing such a unique (even controversial) story. Desplat earns another spot on this list with his “Little Women” soundtrack, showcasing his range. With work across all manner of genres, from various films in the Wes Anderson oeuvre to “Zero Dark Thirty,” it’s no wonder he produced such a fitting and forlorn soundtrack to this timeless epic. –LW
13. “You Were Never Really Here” (2018)
Lynne Ramsay’s “You Were Never Really Here” is a movie that occasionally feels like it’s going to spin out into chaos, even if we’re never in doubt that the filmmaker behind the camera is fully in control of the story she’s telling. Very much in line with the film’s many abrasive stylistic flourishes, Jonny Greenwood’s score for Ramsay’s elliptical and unsettling revenge movie acts as a showcase for this composer’s most unhinged, unclassifiable arrangements to date. The chances that Greenwood takes with his music for “You Were Never Really Here” are dazzling: “Nausea” sounds like Cliff Martinez in the studio on an Adderall bender, “Sandy’s Necklace” rides unexpectedly funky guitar work and seasick strings on a journey that evokes “Amnesiac”-era Radiohead, “Nina Through Glass” is horror-movie music played at a creeping, stomach-churningly slow tempo, while “Dark Sorcerer” sounds like Wang Chung on bath salts. It’s wild, seeing how many different styles that Greenwood attempts to juggle here, but the bigger surprise is that he somehow makes this radical balancing act work in the film’s favor. After all, “You Were Never Really Here” is a volatile film about a volatile man that maneuvers assuredly from the grimmest, most nightmarish scenarios imaginable to breathtakingly fluid action sequences, circling back for seductive arthouse movie style and carefully-deployed instances of extremely bleak comedy. Greenwood manages to cover all these bases dutifully by constructing a kind of destabilizing sonic accompaniment to Ramsay’s film that nevertheless stands on its own as a downright miraculous piece of movie music. – NL
12. “Under The Skin” (2014)
Mica Levi enjoyed a successful career as an experimental pop artist for several years (Micachu and the Shapes), but she became an instant sensation to the ears of cinema—and one to watch— in 2014, with her unnerving soundtrack to Jonathan Glazer’s mysteriously abstract sci-fi film, “Under The Skin.” Glazer’s film, about an alien who falls to earth, is essentially about predators—a mysterious woman (Scarlett Johansson) seduces lonely men in the evening hours in Scotland and harvests their bodies for food. But somewhere along the lines of her self-discovery, she discovers her humanity, and her extra-terrestrial friends turn on her. Levi’s haunting score, atonal, experimental, eerie, and unsettling is as unfathomable as anything Glazer puts on screen. It’s not something you’ll likely put on for fun (which is arguably why it’s so low on this list), but this marriage of stark, hidden-camera-esque imagery and droning, sputtering, plangently twitch-y music—something akin to screaming insects bathed in lava— is one of the most distressing experiences cinema had to offer all decade and perhaps the closest thing we’ll ever see to another Kubrick and Krzysztof Penderecki collaboration we’ll ever hear and see again. – RP
11. “Vox Lux” (2018)
Pop music has become an even more perverse form of autobiography in the era of social media oversaturation: go ask Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, and the very stable genius formerly known as Kanye West if you don’t believe us. It is a medium ideal for self-mythologizing and rewriting one’s own personal history that nevertheless offers its practitioners a platform through which they can comment upon the ebbing cultural tides of the world at large. Brady Corbet’s monumentally ambitious “Vox Lux” is an unsparing satire about this very specific moment in the history of modern American pop music, focused on a Gaga-esque pop diva named Celeste who has risen from the ashes of personal trauma to conquer the world. It’s an unwieldy, unapologetically cerebral work that didn’t resonate with many, but we are confident that Corbet’s follow-up to “The Childhood of a Leader” will have an enduring shelf life – thanks in no small part to its terrific soundtrack. Of course, “Vox Lux” wouldn’t really work if the songs in the movie didn’t slap. And thankfully, they slap hard. “Hologram (Smoke and Mirrors)” sounds like a mid-period Katy Perry earworm bent into a frightening new shape that is both catchy and downright extraterrestrial, and, in a just world, the genuinely stirring “Wrapped Up” – a self-reflexive piano ballad for the ages – would have taken Best Original Song at the 2019 Oscars. These pitch-perfect original songs are accompanied by the minacious score by Scott Walker (returning to collaborate with Corbet a second time), making “Vox Lux” the soundtrack almost as indispensable as “Vox Lux” the motion picture. – NL