I’ve only done about three useful things in my life – I would like to do more but having no talent for anything is a bit of a barrier. Still, if I can do one useful thing through this website then it’s to highlight great music that you might not otherwise find out about, and here’s my latest attempt. You won’t find a better score either on or off the beaten track lately than Stormskerry Maja, a Finnish period drama with music by Lauri Porra. If I tell you that he’s the great grandson of Sibelius and that the talent has clearly flowed down through the genes then hopefully that’s an exciting sta ..read more

Film music isn’t a genre of music – it’s effectively all genres. For a while it was very largely dominated by romantic symphonic music, then jazz came into it, then other 20th century musical forms, and eventually we’ve ended up in a place where it can be anything. Likewise, there are so many ways of scoring a film – Composer A may score a film one way, Composer B may well have scored the same film a very different way, and they may both have been absolutely great film scores. There’s really no “right answer” here. Which brings me to the question – what is film music for? This is something I’v ..read more

With its striking visuals inspired by Studio Ghibli, Planet of Lana is a platforming video game featuring a girl and her cat which achieved positive notices on its release in 2023. Notable to readers of this website is its stirring music composed by Takeshi Furukawa, one of my favourite scores of the year. It starts off with a very Thomas Newman-like main theme in “Progeny” (the kind that Newman himself doesn’t really do any more – orchestral, warm, a whimsical melody) but from there Furukawa engineers a full-blooded orchestral adventure score. The theme briefly appears again at the start of t ..read more

Seven years after writing one of his most extraordinary scores, for Patton, Jerry Goldsmith took on the challenge of scoring a biopic of another of the great WWII generals, Douglas MacArthur. He saw it as an interesting challenge, how to revisit a superficially similar thing but do it in a different way. And while in truth MacArthur cannot compare musically to Patton, one has to take into account that Joseph Sargent’s film is not nearly as good as Franklin Schaffner’s. Following MacArthur from the Pacific battles of WWII to his ultimate removal from the Korean war, it is elevated by Gregory Pe ..read more

An entertaining film about repression and prejudice, Gary Ross’s Pleasantville stars Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon as a pair of siblings who find themselves transported inside a 50s tv show. As she in particular encourages the residents of the town to lose their inhibitions and start being themselves, the characters and locations gradually start shifting from black and white into colour (note the spelling). Randy Newman’s note-perfect score is the film’s greatest element and a great showcase of his extraordinary skills as a film composer – on the right movie he was (is) as good as anyone ..read more

When I was a boy I used to go on walking holidays every year with my dad in North Devon. We’d stay in bed-and-breakfasts and every evening would get back, clean up, have a meal and then do a bit of reading or something before a well-earned night’s sleep. One year the bed-and-breakfast we were staying in had a tattered paperback copy of a book by Piers Paul Read which I started reading and then stayed up half the night to finish – “Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors” about the 1972 plane crash of the Uruguayan rugby team Old Christians and the horrors they endured on their way to some of t ..read more

Four years ago my daughter was enchanted by the animated tv adaptation of Judith Kerr’s timeless children’s classic The Tiger Who Came to Tea and at Christmas 2023 the most-anticipated viewing in our house has been the same team’s adaptation of the same author’s 1976 book Mog’s Christmas, about a cat who gets scared and refuses to come back into the house for Christmas Day. David Arnold wrote a wonderful score for the earlier film and has done so again for Mog’s Christmas, in fact perhaps this one’s even better, the composer sprinkling a real dollop of Christmas magic into his delightful music ..read more

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: I’ve finished work, the fridge is well stocked with cheese, Chris Rea’s on his way home and there’s half of a new film by Zack Snyder on Netflix. It doesn’t get better than that, well until next week and the Cadbury Creme Eggs are out. While not all of the titles I cover in this round-up have a particularly festive theme, pour yourself a Bailey’s and grab a mince pie and if will soon seem like they are. One of my childhood Christmas memories is of sitting on the sofa with my family watching a film and having to explain what was going on in it to my par ..read more

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