Best Movie Scores
Settle it: two at a time →Original music written for the film itself, which rules out jukebox soundtracks stitched together from pop records. The argument this list runs on is separability: a great score works twice, once inside the movie where it carries tension and character, and once on its own, where two seconds of melody can summon the whole picture from memory. Hum the shark. Hum the Empire. If the music only works while the images are playing, it belongs lower here than the ones that escaped the cinema and got into the culture.
Ranked by 1 person · 15 items
Star Wars - John Williams is first on the one ballot cast so far.
Global Ranking
The 1977 score brought the full symphony orchestra back to a Hollywood that had given up on it, and if purists are right that half of it is remodeled Holst and Korngold, the remodeling is still the most influential act of film scoring here.
Shore built a system of themes across three films that tracks cultures, objects, and corruption the way opera does, a scale of ambition nothing else here attempts. The price of that architecture is that few cues stand alone. The Shire music travels; most of the rest needs Middle-earth around it.
The Joker gets barely a theme at all, two razored notes that make your shoulders climb toward your ears. Written with James Newton Howard, the score trades melody for pressure, so nothing in it can be hummed the way the Star Wars fanfare can. You feel it and then fail to remember it.
The brachiosaurus reveal works because Williams scores dinosaurs as a miracle instead of a monster movie. It is really two enormous themes doing all the lifting, and next to the wall-to-wall invention of his Star Wars writing that economy can look thin. The themes are just that good.
He's a Pirate is the closest an orchestra gets to a bar brawl, and it dragged swashbuckler music out of the museum. The awkward part is the byline, since Klaus Badelt carried the credit on the first film with Zimmer supervising, and the music itself is one heroic cell repeated louder and louder, none of the architecture Shore builds elsewhere on this list. It works anyway.
Silvestri scored a teen comedy about a car like it was the liberation of Europe, and that straight face is why the DeLorean's takeoff still lands. It is one magnificent theme and not a lot else, which is the Jurassic Park criticism with one fewer theme in reserve.
Vangelis proved a synthesizer could grieve, something the orchestral entries here need whole string sections to do. Every neon-soaked thing since has borrowed the sound into cliche, and for years the actual recordings were close to impossible to hear legally, which stunted its standing.
The church organ turns a space movie into a requiem, and the ticking that counts away lost years on the water planet is scoring doing the plot's job. It is also the loudest entry here, burying whole lines of dialogue, which plenty of viewers count as vandalism rather than boldness.
Two notes, and every swimmer since has heard them in open water, a reflex not even the Star Wars fanfare triggers. Spielberg laughed the first time Williams played the idea, assuming it was a joke. Hardly anyone remembers the rest of the score, which is livelier and stranger than the shark theme suggests, and that forgetting is the fair knock.
Jarre got the job after bigger names fell through and wrote the desert its theme in a matter of weeks; it is still the sound cinema reaches for whenever sand fills the frame. What it lacks is interior life. Herrmann scores minds, Jarre paints landscapes.
Strings only, and the shower cue rewired what an audience's nerves could be made to do. Herrmann's black-and-white palette matches the film exactly, which is also the limit: this is a knife of a score, one purpose, none of the warmth the Williams entries here run on.
Williams told Spielberg the film deserved a better composer than him, and the humility shows in how little the music does next to his own Star Wars maximalism: mostly a single violin line, given to Itzhak Perlman. The standing objection is that it beautifies horror that should stay unbearable, and that argument has never fully gone away.
Rota's mournful trumpet and seasick waltz tell you the family is damned before the story does, the closest this list comes to opera outside of Shore. The Academy withdrew his nomination when the love theme turned out to be recycled from one of his own earlier comedies, a footnote that bothers awards historians more than it has ever bothered the music.
Morricone scored a western with a coyote yell, whistles, whip cracks, and a surf guitar, and invented a sound the genre never escaped. Set beside the symphonic entries here it can read as a novelty record. Then The Ecstasy of Gold starts building and the argument is over.
Reznor and Ross score ambition as a low electronic hum with something rotten underneath, and half the prestige dramas since have copied the trick without the menace. The palette stays deliberately narrow, with none of the lift the fanfares elsewhere here trade in, which is honest about the film and a ceiling on the music heard alone.
