8 Movies With Great Scores and Soundtracks

Usually, a movie having a good score is enough music-wise, or if a movie wants to have a soundtrack of pre-existing songs, that tends to suffice. You know, you’ve got The Good, the Bad and the Ugly or Star Wars, which have scores that are written for the movies themselves, and then you’ve also got films like Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting, with the music there being pre-existing songs that add something to the scenes they accompany.

Movies that do a bit of both are less common, but not entirely unheard of. To try and highlight this, what follows is a collection of films that have both memorable scores and soundtracks. Basically, if there’s instrumental music written for a film, or original songs composed for a movie, that counts as a score. And if there are already-existing songs taken and used in the movie (and such selections worked well), you’ve got yourself a soundtrack. The following movies, to some extent, all do both at the same time.

8

‘An American Werewolf in London’ (1981)

Image via Universal Pictures

The score of An American Werewolf in London tends to get overlooked by the soundtrack, which is somewhat understandable, because the soundtrack is very memorable, and also undeniably novel. The songs all have titles that reference the moon, which might sound gimmicky, but it works. You get a few different versions of “Blue Moon,” “Moondance” by Van Morrison, and “Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence Clearwater Revival; that kind of thing.

On the score side of things, though, An American Werewolf in London’s was done by Elmer Bernstein, and when his music is featured in the film, it’s great, and adds almost as much as all the song selections. The music goes a long way toward making this arguably the very best werewolf movie of all time (and it had some serious competition in 1981 alone), and then it’s also an absolute all-timer as far as comedy-horror films go.

7

‘Call Me by Your Name’ (2017)

Image via Sony Pictures Classics

Call Me by Your Name is set in the 1980s, and some of the music here is willing to remind you of that. That’s okay, though, because the selections from the decade are all sound, and also honestly not too cheesy. “Love My Way” by The Psychedelic Furs is about as pop as it gets, yet still always welcome, and then there’s some stuff by Ryuichi Sakamoto and also Giorgio Moroder (the latter’s name will come up again, a couple more times, later on) thrown in for good measure.

As for the original music done for Call Me by Your Name, that comes from Sufjan Stevens, which is going to be counted as a score here, since it was made for the movie. One song of his, “Mystery of Love,” even got an Oscar nomination, and then part of the reason Call Me by Your Name’s ending is so effective is because it utilizes another original song by Sufjan Stevens, “Visions of Gideon,” quite perfectly. Then, there’s a remix of a song Stevens had already recorded, back in 2010 (“Futile Devices”), which you could argue fits into either the soundtrack or the score side of things.

6

‘Aftersun’ (2022)

Image via A24

Music is about as important as it can be, in Aftersun, for a film that’s not directly about music or a musician necessarily, nor a musical itself. Aftersun is a drama about a young father and his daughter going on a holiday trip together, with the father clearly struggling with personal demons the daughter couldn’t really see or understand at the time, though as an adult, she’s looking back on the experience and coming to terms with it.

It’s very emotionally intense in a slow-burn sort of way. It takes a while for Aftersun to really hit you, but the patience is admirable, and it is eventually devastating. The score, by Oliver Coates, is appropriately moody and understated, adding to the sense of nostalgia and emotional unease throughout, while the soundtrack also perfectly utilizes some iconic songs that, post-Aftersun, are hard to associate with anything but Aftersun (see, especially, “Tender” by Blur, “Losing My Religion” by R.E.M., and especially “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie).

5

‘Electric Dreams’ (1984)

Image via 20th Century Fox

As promised, here’s Giorgio Moroder again, whose contributions to Electric Dreams make the whole movie worth watching. The film itself is very underrated, and also wonderfully/aggressively ‘80s in just about every way, the music included. Some of it fits within the confines of a score, because Moroder did compose some instrumental tracks for the film, like “The Duel” (which reworks “Minuet in G major” by Christian Petzold), and “Madeline’s Theme.”

The songs here are more in-your-face, though, and plenty of them were written for the movie, sure, but they’re getting counted as part of the soundtrack here. If there is any opportunity to shout out Electric Dreams in some way, it must be seized. The highlight of the whole soundtrack – and the whole movie, really – is “Together in Electric Dreams,” which is a collaboration between Moroder and Philip Oakey (of The Human League), which is one of those songs made for a movie that ended up more or less surpassing the movie, in terms of popularity.

4

‘Mysterious Skin’ (2004)

Image via Tartan Films

This fits into the same camp as Aftersun, in terms of being a devastating film that uses music incredibly well throughout. Mysterious Skin, furthermore, is quite patiently paced, like Aftersun, and then it has a soundtrack that stands out a bit more than the score… though the score is still worth noting, and it is important overall, being composed by Robin Guthrie (formerly of Cocteau Twins) and Harold Budd (perhaps best known for his albums done in collaboration with Brian Eno).

Speaking of Cocteau Twins, one of the band’s songs, “Crushed,” is heard in the soundtrack. There’s also quite a bit of shoegaze in the soundtrack, which very much complements the film’s atmosphere and feel (Ride’s “Drive Blind,” and then “Dagger” by Slowdive, as well as the latter band’s cover of “Golden Hair,” by Syd Barrett). The most striking soundtrack choice in Mysterious Skin is that of the third untitled track from the 2002 untitled album by Sigur Rós (that song is sometimes known as “Samskeyti”), though, which is heard in the film’s closing moments.

3

‘The Crow’ (1994)

Image via Miramax Films

The score of The Crow, composed by Graeme Revell, does feel close to a bit melodramatic at points, but it works with the emotions the movie’s trying to depict, and it does click tonally, too. The Crow is highly stylized and also entirely sincere and unsubtle, being a great adaptation of a high-intensity graphic novel that, with the movie making things a bit less abstract than the source material, but still retaining the same fantastical revenge story. Both the graphic novel and movie are about dealing with intense grief, too.

The source material references music quite a lot throughout, and so it’s fitting, then, that The Crow (1994) also contains a number of songs by well-regarded artists. Many were covers of pre-existing songs done by bands for the movie, like Nine Inch Nails doing a great rendition of Joy Division’s “Dead Souls.” Some non-instrumental songs were also written specifically for the film, with the highlight in that regard being “Burn” by The Cure, which is one of the band’s best post-Disintegration tracks.

2

‘Scarface’ (1983)

One more Moroder movie, Scarface works for plenty of other reasons beyond just the music, as one of the best epic films of its decade, and also proving pretty great as a bombastic and rather thrilling gangster movie. The music, though, is so good throughout, with Giorgio Moroder composing an instrumental score that tends to get overshadowed by the songs used throughout the film.

That’s not such a bad thing for Moroder, though, since he also produced and co-wrote the non-instrumental songs you hear throughout Scarface, like “Rush Rush” (sung by Debbie Harry, of Blondie), “She’s on Fire” (sung by Amy Holland), and “Scarface (Push It to the Limit)” (sung by Paul Engemann). Electric Dreams was mentioned earlier as being very 1980s, but Scarface might well be even “more” ‘80s in its feel, and the music is an undeniably huge factor in the film feeling that way.

1

‘Magnolia’ (1999)

Image via New Line Cinema

Magnolia is a very long movie, clocking in at over three hours, so it’s a bit like Scarface in the sense that it’s got a good deal of time (or room?) for a lot of music to be heard throughout. Some of it was written just for the movie, by singer-songwriter Aimee Mann, though a few of her already existing/written songs were added, making them more like soundtrack picks.

There was some music done as a traditional score heard in Magnolia, too, composed by Jon Brion. And then further, there were songs by other artists used at a handful of important moments, with two Supertramp tracks, “Goodbye Stranger” and “The Logical Song” (both from the album Breakfast in America), proving very memorable. The music’s emotional, the movie’s emotional, and many of the performances are big, flashy, and also – you guessed it – emotional. Magnolia is almost too maximalist for this kind of drama, or at least that’s what you might expect/fear, but Paul Thomas Anderson makes it all work seamlessly, somehow.