Some movies can get away without a soundtrack—or with a minimal soundtrack—if the content speaks for itself loud enough. Great movies in this tradition include No Country for Old Men, Rear Window, A Separation and Open Hearts. That said, music makes it so much easier for the audience to be engaged with the material. Sometimes, it can even make us care for stories and characters we wouldn’t normally care about. And that’s all the for the best, since one of the primary missions of cinema is to take audiences on explorations of new territory and different modes of being, alongside characters who can be strange compared to the ones viewers are familiar with in their personal lives and close entourage.
Below is a list of great movies from the second half of the 2010s elevated by their soundtracks (songs, a score, or a mix of the two) in memorable ways. We’ll see how the music also went hand-in-hand with the movies’ themes.
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12 Spider-Man: Homecoming
The idea of Spider-Man: Homecoming is that without a hero attentive to solving the problems of the little man, we get villains like Vulture. Michael Keaton’s villain was an everyman forced out of his business by guys like Tony Stark, good but oblivious, and too concerned with bigger threats. Michael Giacchino’s music finds triumph in the way Tom Holland’s character commits to the everyday problems of everyday people. It finds the epic in the “friendly neighborhood Spider-Man” way.
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11 Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Sony
The centerpiece of the soundtrack for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, a major work in modern animation, is without a doubt the scene in which Miles connects memories, words and ideas together in his mind, finding the inspiration to become Spider-Man. Going up and down with Spidey’s swings, Daniel Pemberton’s score, mixed with “What’s Up Danger?”, rises many times only to swerve back down without entirely climaxing. Like the best music, it leaves the listener wanting more for a while before taking full flight.
10 Moonlight
A24
Who can forget the ocean scene in which Little is carried by his father figure (Mahershala Ali)? Nicholas Britell’s swelling strings make the scene what it is. Moonlight is many things. It’s considered one the greatest gay love stories in movie history, but, more than that, it’s also an elliptical collection of scenes from a life, which feels only richer and more poetic because of how it’s not precisely detailed from start to end. There are gaps in the middle, and a person’s life can be like the endless ocean, but some memories are as vivid as those splashes of water on a young kid’s face.
9 Annihilation
Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow’s score for Annihilation is unpredictable and fear-inspiring—not in a jump-scare way but in a repetitive, mostly low rumble of dissonant sounds that together form something mysterious. The music still coheres into something beautiful, in its own alien way, in the aptly-named track “The Alien”.
8 Ford v Ferrari
Composer Marco Beltrami, nominated at the Oscars for his great work on 3:10 to Yuma and The Hurt Locker, provides a very fitting score here to a racing movie, the highly entertaining Ford v Ferrari. The music captures the propulsive nature of the racetrack, with all of its adrenaline, sweat and dirt.
7 Carol
The Weinstein Company
In many scenes of Carol, a movie about forbidden romance, the characters played by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara can’t do much aside from exchange looks and glances at each other. But Carter Burwell’s score, at once delicate and swelling, speaks volumes. It’s the expression of their entire inner voice.
6 Nocturnal Animals
In Nocturnal Animals, Susan (Amy Adams) receives a novel written by the husband she left twenty years before (Jake Gyllenhaal). He’s asking for her opinion. As she reads and reads, it makes her recall flashbacks of their relationship, in which she treated him with lack of worth. The music by Abel Korzeniowski is sumptuous. It’s a darkly atmospheric score for a darkly atmospheric movie about feelings and moves of weakness and strength.
5 The Red Turtle
Prima Linea Productions
Despite a Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination, The Red Turtle is a small movie from the great Studio Ghibli catalogue that needs a larger audience. It’s a great artistic work about man’s relationship with nature, which can both cut us off and provide for us. Director Michael Dudok de Wit said he wanted to capture “a profound, deep awe for nature. And I don’t mean lovely sunsets and animals, but for Nature with a capital N.” Laurent Perez Del Mar’s score conveys a majesty that fits exactly what Dudok de Wit was going for.
4 La La Land
Summit Entertainment
La La Land is a gift of a movie—and an arguably perfect love story—and it’s not often that original songs written specifically for movies are that strong. “City of Stars” isn’t a great song in a movie—it’s a great song, period. Many songs and tracks from Justin Horowitz’s score contain bits of the tunes from other tracks, so there’s a great continuity that connects the whole thing. It’s a soundtrack that can be enjoyed and loved as its own thing, but Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone certainly add their charm to it in the film.
3 Black Panther
The best movies imbue their villains with powerful pathos, and so it is in Black Panther. In fact, it’s done to a degree that’s uncommon for a blockbuster, to the point that in the final battle, the loss is felt on both sides. A key element to this is Ludwig Göransson’s score. Besides the very cool Wakanda theme, he’s written rich music for the more emotional scenes. “Ancestral Plane” is a great track that paints the tragedy behind what drives Killmonger. But Göransson doesn’t forget to also give a villain his lethal and evil edge (“Killmonger’s Challenge”).
2 A Hidden Life
James Newton Howard’s music for A Hidden Life conveys the peaceful tranquility of a simple, idyllic life lived by Franz, Fani and their children in the countryside. “We lived above the clouds. It seemed no trouble could reach our valley,” says Fani. The music is very important for the remainder of the movie, after trouble does reach them. Nazis call on every able man to join the cause and Franz simply refuses to walk against his conscience. The music is a continuing reminder of what he fights for as he decides he’ll follow his conscience to the letter and live a truthful life no matter where it leads, despite everyone around him indicating how this self-destruction won’t amount to a drop in the ocean in the face of the Nazi tide. He doesn’t know if his actions will even be witnessed, let alone written about (they will be); he only knows what he’s doing is strong and right, without fully understanding how. The music accompanies him on his path.
1 First Man
Universal Pictures
In First Man, Neil Armstrong is simply a man who, after suffering the great loss of his daughter, one day decides he might go to work. That’s how a chain of events that will eventually lead him to the moon starts and soon becomes unstoppable. The tragedy and the moon landing mission become strangely linked. Justin Hurwitz’s second score on this list bridges these two elements together: the very personal (“The Armstrongs”) and the historically epic (“The Landing”). They echo each other. For Neil, they do. And then, they mystically meld (“The Crater”) as Neil finds closure. Damien Chazelle’s movie is an underrated masterpiece, and its soundtrack is sublime.
Honorable mentions for this list: The Handmaiden, Call Me by Your Name, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Goodbye Christopher Robin, I Lost My Body, Phantom Thread, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and Far from the Madding Crowd.
