My 21 Favorite Film Scores From 21 Favorite Composers
Ranging from the Golden Age of Hollywood to the present.
Last week, I shared a list of my 100 favorite films per director. Today, I’m sharing a list of my 21 favorite scores— and once again, I’m picking only one score per composer1.
Unlike the 100 favorite films, I had to make even more brutal cuts simply to fit the list. And just as last week’s list exposed my gaps in my film education, this one makes it even more apparent that I have a lot more to learn about film scores.
What are your favorite film scores and who are your favorite composers? If you have any film scores not included here, please share them in the comments.
The Adventures of Robin Hood – Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1938)
Big, bold, and brassy. Old-school Hollywood at its finest, capturing the spirit of the swashbuckling Robin Hood.
Casablanca – Max Steiner (1942)
Max Steiner balances the music just right without letting it overpower the emotion: it’s romantic but not sappy, wistful but not saccharine.
The Third Man – Anton Karas (1949)
The only film that Anton Karas ever scored, because until director Carol Reed plucked him up when hearing him play the zither one night in Vienna, he was an unknown performer. The zither’s music perfectly captures the mood of post-WW2 Vienna, and the story of deception and betrayal and love unfolding before us.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – Ennio Morricone (1966)
The theme for this film is probably Ennio Morricone’s most famous theme song, but the rest of the soundtrack is fantastic, too. He composed the music before Leone shot the film, allowing the director to play it on set and dictate his movements and editing choices to the rhythm of the score, which only enhances the musicality of the picture.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – John Barry (1969)
For George Lazenby’s one and only outing as Bond, John Barry created a soundtrack using electronic instruments to give it a different mood. The title track in particular is fantastic, equal parts aggressive and yet also tragic.
Chinatown – Jerry Goldsmith (1974)
From the first mournful note to the last, Jerry Goldsmith creates a musical landscape that evokes the sentiment of Chinatown long before its tragic climax. What’s even more impressive is that he only had ten days to compose and record the score after producer Robert Evans rejected Phillip Lambro's work at the last minute.
Taxi Driver – Bernard Hermann (1976)
This would be the last score that the great Bernard Hermann would compose— he died hours after he completed the recording— and it’s a great work to sign off on, creating within us the uneasiness of being in Travis Bickle’s orbit. Uncomfortable? It’s doing its job.
Star Wars – John Williams (1977)
The score that John Williams was working his entire life towards, combining all his talents into creating an operatic soundtrack as big as the picture he was making it for. George Lucas told him he wanted something that evoked the Golden Age of Hollywood, something familiar, to pair it with the fantastical images he had instead of a futuristic sound. The rest is history.
Risky Business – Tangerine Dream (1983)
Tangerine Dream’s soundtrack feels like a teenage boy’s hormones converted into music. Moody, romantic, lusty, youthful, anxious.
Blade Runner – Vangelis (1984)
Vangelis channels classical music through synthesizers and creates a soundtrack that is dripping with noir. The “Tears in Rain” soundtrack, in particular, makes you feel like you are there in the rain.
Witness – Maurice Jarre (1985)
In the 80s, Maurice Jarre started experimenting with electronic instruments and synthesizers. For Witness, he composes a music landscape that conveys the Amish lifestyle, while injecting a romantic lyricism whenever Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis are on screen together.
The Lion King – Hans Zimmer (1994)
The soundtrack for a lot of 90s kids, myself included. Hans Zimmer scored this film because he wanted to write something for his daughter at the time. He drew from his personal experience of losing his father when he was young, and you can feel that emotion in the music especially in the soundtrack when Mufasa dies.
Fargo – Carter Burwell (1996)
Carter Burwell’s score is as stripped down and unfussy as the rest of the film, but without losing the sense of danger and darkness underneath the banal-looking surface and pleasantry. Apparently, he took the main motif from the Norwegian folk song, ‘The Lost Sheep’ which seems appropriate in a story about bumbling criminals and a terrible plan hatched by an incompetent car salesman.
Spirited Away – Joe Hisaishi (2001)
The music captures the mood of Spirited Away, in which innocence and danger exist together, while also being wistful and fantastical and scary all together.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King – Howard Shore (2003)
You can listen to the music on its own and it still tells a story. The only reason I ranked this over The Fellowship of the Ring is that two tracks in particular, ‘The Black Gate Opens’ and ‘The Grey Havens’, are absolutely outstanding. It’s really operatic and grand in scale, which feels appropriate for Tolkien’s epic finale.
The Social Network – Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross (2010)
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross had never composed music for a film before, but they killed it on their first attempt. Listen closely to their main theme, ‘Hand Covers Bruise’, and you’ll notice that as it recurs through the film, it gradually starts to sound hollow, as protagonist Mark Zuckerberg alienates everybody around him while triumphing… over what?
The Grand Budapest Hotel – Alexandre Desplat (2014)
It captures the whimsy of Wes Anderson’s confectionery-colored tale, but also hints at the darker undercurrents beneath it. While it sweeps you away at first, it eventually hits you hard when the story reaches its conclusion.
Aftersun – Oliver Coates (2022)
This score wins simply for the track ‘One Without From’, which is literally a few bars repeated over and over again on a violin. But what it sounds like is a child’s plaintive cry, over and over, as if stuck and unable to move on— which is appropriate for the story about a woman remembering the last time she saw her father alive when she was a young girl. It’s memory fossilized into music, frozen and aching, and heartbreaking.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse – Daniel Pemberton (2023)
The music throws you through the movie like Miles Morales flung through the multiverse and it is an absolute sonic rollercoaster.
Oppenheimer – Ludwig Göransson (2023)
Ludwig Göransson captures Oppenheimer’s emotional state of turmoil, and it’s great. Christopher Nolan didn’t have a lot of instructions for the composer, except an idea to use the violin to portray Oppenheimer. Göransson took it, ran with it, won his second Oscar for it.
One Battle After Another – Jonny Greenwood (2025)
Jonny Greenwood’s entire score feels like frayed nerves on edge, in a perpetual state of anxiety— which is exactly how paranoid Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) feels throughout the movie. It’s one of his Greenwood’s best scores, and it’s a tragedy that he lost out an Oscar for this.
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Long live the movies!
D.L. Holmes
Which eliminates nearly all of John Williams’ and Hans Zimmer’s scores.