I loved Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See – it very slowly and very delicately tells twin storylines about a young blind girl who moves with her father from Paris to St Malo as Germany occupies France in WWII, and a young German radio engineer who has a lot of doubts about the war – and beautifully culminates in their storylines coming together. Sadly the Netflix adaptation didn’t really do any of this, dumping so much of the build-up that it becomes almost entirely unmoving, which is quite the achievement given the source material. It would be hard however to say a bad word ab ..read more

Say what you will about the films of M. Night Shyamalan, I don’t think there’s any doubt that the eight of them scored by James Newton Howard are made so much better thanks to his contribution. The composer has built up numerous directorial relationships over his long career and enjoys ongoing collaborations with many of them – I think it’s the one with Shyamalan that has inspired him the most, resulting in the very best of him, and it’s a great shame that it appears (for now at least) to have ended. Those eight scores are drastically rearranged for Howard’s first album in a new deal with Sony ..read more

An eight-part series which tells the four billion year story of life on Earth (couldn’t they have been a bit more ambitious?), Netflix’s Life On Our Planet is produced by Steve Spielberg and the man behind so many great natural history documentaries, Alastair Fothergill, and narrated by Morgan Freeman. It apparently uses a mix of CGI and real footage to tell its story, so I suppose it’s somewhere between Netflix’s Our Planet and Apple’s Prehistoric Planet. The music for these shows tends to be either by George Fenton or someone impersonating George Fenton, with the sweeping orchestral majesty ..read more

The Burial is not just set in the 1990s, it very much feels as if it was made then. A courtroom drama very much like that decade’s various John Grisham adaptations – only this time loosely based on a true story – it features a real Movie Star performance by Jamie Foxx who is completely electric as a lawyer helping funeral home manager Tommy Lee Jones take on the big boys. Everything about it is like a thirty-year throwback, delightfully including its score, by Michael Abels. There’s a really nice gentle Americana theme for Jones’s character, introduced in the opening “You Done Good” and heard ..read more

When you think about “influential scores”, it’s quite interesting (to me, anyway) that they tend to roll off the tongue when you think about the last quarter of a century – The Rock, Gladiator, American Beauty, The Bourne Identity, The Dark Knight – but when you think about it, they really didn’t tend to exist in the same way before that. It’s not like after Star Wars came out and was successful, all of a sudden half of all film scores sounded like Star Wars – you tended to have a load of composers who were quite distinctive and hired because the filmmakers wanted them to sound like themselves ..read more

The penultimate film directed by Nicholas Meyer, Company Business was an unfortunate casualty of timing. A cold war thriller about a CIA/KGB prisoner exchange gone wrong, the film entered production as the Berlin Wall fell and real life was rendering its content immediately irrelevant – rushed rewrites ended up making it seem like a bit of a mess, despite it starring the great Gene Hackman and legendary Russian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. Meyer certainly had a gift for picking composers for his projects and there was no hotter property in film music at the time when it came to action thrillers ..read more

There are many ways to skin a cat. After decades of asking Patrick Doyle to score his films, Kenneth Branagh decided for A Haunting in Venice to go a very different route, turning to one of film music’s hottest properties Hildur Guðnadóttir instead. As film composers they could barely be more different – not just the type of music they write, but they way they apply it to the film. To state the blindingly obvious, Doyle is a traditionalist – using the music to provide emotion as well as to enforce the film’s narrative arc – in other words, doing what film music typically did until things shift ..read more

MOVIE WAVE RECORDS PROUDLY ANNOUNCES A NEW ALBUM RELEASE: THE GARDENER’S APPRENTICE by composer SERVIS D’APARTMENT Album features music by acclaimed new composer – film generating buzz around the world – epic tale spanning generations – music inspired by Tár is already exciting renowned critics Servis D’Apartment was working as a surgeon when one day – despite having no musical background or training of any kind – he decided to identify as a film composer. “It was really an easy decision,” explains D’Apartment from his home in Bogota. “I noticed that there is a large number of people who spend ..read more

2023 will forever be remembered as being the year when – for the first time in the history of cinema – two quite different films aimed at quite different audiences were released on the same day as each other. It is hard to overstate just how hilarious this is and quite understandable why it inspired social media memes day after day for a period of several months. Oh, how I laughed. The first of this such unlikely pairing was Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, whose scenes of heavy dialogue were shot with IMAX cameras in order to provide the optimal experience to people watching the film on their ..read more

Wes Craven’s Deadly Blessing was about the only one of his first few films that didn’t go on to become a cult favourite – ironic, given it’s about a cult (well, kind of). A man is murdered after he decides to leave his Amish-type community to marry; his wife and her friends are then left in the middle of all sorts of satanic goings on. James Horner rarely dabbled in the horror genre once he established himself, but in 1981 – when he was only 27 – three of the four films he scored were horrors, with this one sitting in between The Hand and Wolfen. The filmmakers wanted him to make it sound like ..read more