The 25 Best Movie Scores of the ’80s

David Ehrlich and Christian Blauvelt
·37 min read

The ’80s was a decade of movies that you can hear at a roar even on mute. A screenshot of Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay aboard the train in “Risky Business” has a sound to it. The same goes for a still image of Kaneda riding towards Neo-Tokyo in “Akira,” or Jack Nicholson’s car snaking its way up the mountains towards the Overlook Hotel during the opening titles of “The Shining.”

It was a decade of synths and sad jazz; a decade of legends reaching the height of their powers (e.g. John Williams and Ennio Morricone), and of newcomers from other disciplines becoming cinematic virtuosos in their own right (e.g. Ryuichi Sakamoto and Philip Glass). The movies had never sounded that way before, but the best film scores of the ’80s — our picks are listed below — continue to echo in our minds as if they’ve always been there.

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Adam Solomons, Sean Malin, and Christian Zilko also contributed to this article.

25. “Witness” (Composed by Maurice Jarre, 1985)

The call came from inside the house when David Lean collaborator Maurice Jarre turned to the synthesizer shortly after his son, Jean-Michel, helped make modern electronic music happen in the mid-to-late 1970s. The elder Jarre peaked in his later era of composing with a terrific score for Peter Weir’s crime thriller about an Amish boy who witnesses a brutal murder — and becomes a target. An easy interpretation would be that the Amish community’s unfamiliarity with technology, 20th century morality or the hotness of Harrison Ford is the perfect backdrop for Jarre’s electronic sound, the past and the future colliding violently. But it’s also the case that to use a synth score in 1985 was barely an artistic choice in and of itself.

As Jarre scores go, “Witness” isn’t quite “Lawrence of Arabia” for scale or memorability — but it gets damn close. There are moments of real percussive tension to remind us that a boy’s life is at stake, and that Harrison Ford’s presence in the community threatens its entire existence (this movie is crazy, by the way). But Jarre also taps into the simple beauty of Amish life in lifting the memorable barn building scene that took up only a paragraph in the script, but means so much more. To do both in one score is no mean feat. You can see why he got to like the synth. —AS

24. “Fitzcarraldo” (Composed by Popol Vuh, 1982)

Popol Vuh and Werner Herzog go together the way Herzog and Klaus Kinski go together, only much less violently. The German band scored “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser,” “Nosferatu, the Vampyre,” and several others, but they saved the best for “Fitzcarraldo.”

Take “Wehe Khorazin”: a dies irae-like chorus gives way to unhinged chanting, and a thudding bass drum dissolves into a wailing fuzzed-out guitar with a tambourine. It’s a sonic journey from the sacred to the profane, and therefore a perfect accompaniment to Herzog’s heavily fictionalized historical epic about an Irish rubber baron (Kinski) and his obsessive desire to build an opera deep within the Amazon rainforest. It’s the sound of reason being swallowed by chaos.

The krautrockers get more reflective too on “Engel der luft,” with its shimmering hi-hats, plaintive woodwinds, and calming piano chords. And a wide range of influences appears on the score — “Musik aus Burundi” is percussive mood music extraordinaire — indicative of the unexpected diversity the film shows was typical of the Amazon basin in the late 19th century. Of course, there are also many excerpts from classic opera works, some of them recorded by Caruso himself. After all, art makes the madness of life go down that much sweeter. —CB  

23. “Round Midnight” (Composed by Herbie Hancock, 1986)

More so than many of the scores on this list, the suite of music that Herbie Hancock contributed to Bertrand Tavernier’s great jazz film starring the legendary saxophonist Dexter Gordon is rather light on original pieces. Most of the soundtrack consists of new Hancock arrangements of old standards, including Thelonious Monk’s title track, and “Body and Soul,” as well as songs by Bud Powell, Jimmy Rowles, and the Gershwins.

And yet Hancock makes all of these pieces feel like his own through bending them all towards a mood of sustained melancholy. If you know him primarily from “Head Hunters” and his funky fusion in the ‘70s, forget it. He’s operating in the mode of Chet Baker — who appears on these tracks — and early Miles Davis here. This is the lonely, cool jazz you’d imagine accompanying an Edward Hopper painting, street lamps reflecting off damp streets after rain. Closing time.

Hancock assembled essentially the Avengers of jazz to replicate that particular moment in the 1950s when jazz went from the pop mainstream to a more niche, reflective place that hadn’t yet totally abandoned melody for groove: Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams, Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter, Billy Higgins, Lonette McKee, and, of course, Gordon. When “Round Midnight” won the Oscar for Best Original Score, it was met with consternation — including from fellow nominee Ennio Morricone, shortlisted for his work on “The Mission” — for the very thing we said to start: It’s not entirely an original score. It only sounds that way.  —CB

22. “The Beekeeper” (Composed by Eleni Karaindrou, 1986)

Eleni Karaindrou’s music for “The Beekeeper” may be the least well-known of the scores on this list, but that’s only because the film itself is among the least well-known of Theodoros Angelopoulos’ work (whose most famous stuff has struggled to gain the kind of foothold in the canon that it deserves).

Be that as it may, Karaindrou’s plaintive but soaring compositions make for some of the ’80s’ most robust film music. Saxophones blown like foghorns power through pillow-soft pianos during the early portions of this mournful story about a beekeeper traveling across Greece on his ill-fated journey home from his daughter’s wedding, only for that funereal tone to be disrupted by a playful waltz, a few crunchy blasts of cheese-rock, and a healthy serving of traditional folk melodies as it teeters towards the grave. There’s a visceral narrative baked into these notes, one so vivid that the film itself almost seems like an accompaniment to its score, and not the other way around. —DE

21. “Once Upon a Time in America” (Composed by Ennio Morricone, 1984)

Sergio Leone’s gangster epic is a bit of a mess, but any film so singularly about the nature of memory as this one should be. What’s in no way a mess is Ennio Morricone’s Proustian reverie of a score, which couldn’t work more beautifully to capture the feelings of an old man for his lost youth — and the lost potential of his youth. “Deborah’s Theme” is the stuff Academy Awards movie montages are made of, a work of orchestral grandeur and heartache.

This is a far more traditional score than we often got with Morricone — certainly compared to his whistle, organ, and electric guitar-filled Spaghetti Western themes or the heart-palpitations electronica of “The Thing.” His work for “Once Upon a Time in America” is more of a piece with his work on “Days of Heaven,” melancholy and introspective, avoiding the more obvious menace Nino Rota put in the “Godfather” movies. Where “Days of Heaven” mixed in bits of Camille Saint-Saens’ “Carnival of the Animals,” “Once Upon a Time in America” gives a sumptuous orchestral version of “Amapola,” the tune from Spanish American composer Joseph Lacalle that became a Billboard number one hit for Jimmy Dorsey in 1941.

The one area where Morricone really goes for the unexpected is with Romanian musician Gheorghe Zamfir playing his pan flute (much as Zamfir did in “Picnic at Hanging Rock”) over scenes of Robert De Niro’s Noodles getting wasted in his opium den and thinking back in the track “Childhood Memories.” It’s such a different sound that it all the more encourages the idea that the entire film is Noodles’ opium-fueled hallucination. Whatever. This is all so gorgeous that it very much stands apart from whatever conceptual gamesmanship Leone might have been implying. In most other composers’ filmographies, “Once Upon a Time in America” would be a true peak — but Morricone’s work is a mountain range. —CB

20. “My Neighbor Totoro” (Composed by Joe Hisaishi, 1988)

It feels weird and maybe even wrong to write about a Ghibli movie as originating in any decade. Hayao Miyazaki’s films have always been distinctly, intentionally otherworldly both in content and craft. His mainstream breakthrough film was a mission statement for a new way of making animated movies, its unforgettable score appropriately different to anything that had come before. The tune we remember is quirky and uplifting, the sort of song two uncertain young children would make up about an imaginary friend. Although for many Western audiences “My Neighbor Totoro” was the first Ghibli film they saw — and its simple but arresting story an apt introduction to the Ghibli way — there’s nothing plucky about Joe Hisaishi’s music. Having previously scored “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” and “Castle in the Sky,” his understanding of Miyazaki’s sensibility was well-established. That much is clear in a score that noisily illustrates the straightforward emotional peaks and troughs of its primary characters.

The highlight of the film’s soundscaping is surely one of its quietest scenes, when Satsuki (Noriko Hidaka), Mei (Chika Sakamoto) and Totoro wait at an unsheltered bus stop in the rain. The boing of the raindrops on Totoro’s umbrella and the thud when he jumps do as much to create the mood of this scene as Satsuki’s terrified expression and Mei’s sleepy ignorance. The loud scenes are good too, like when the kids, Totoro, and a pair of his magical friends make acorns sprout. A synthy percussive score that builds excitement is suddenly joined by violins and high brass notes exactly as the plants stem out of the ground. It’s a case of editing and music working together as an art form of their own, and one of many reminders why Totoro’s music has helped it live long in the memory. —AS

19. “Crocodile Dundee” (Composed by Peter Best, 1986)

These days, it’s incredible to remember that “Crocodile Dundee,” a charmingly low-key fish-out-of-water rom-com, was the second highest-grossing movie of 1986. Even more incredible to think that it has a score this good, and was emblematic of a time when rom-coms could have incredible scores, in this case thanks to Australian composer Peter Best. The “Opening Titles” track opens with a didgeridoo, of course, but moves immediately into a Down Under twangy guitar theme, the strings plucked with the force of playing a thumb piano. It’s shocking how hard this theme goes.

And how good the rest of the score is throughout. There’s a lovely four-note wistful theme called “Never Never Land” that’s initially played on the flute and conveys Mick Dundee’s (Paul Hogan) love of the Bush, his home. When he journeys with reporter Sue Charlton (Linda Kozlowski) to New York, that “Never Never Land” theme is played on a synthesizer instead. Now it’s not just affection for his homeland, it’s longing for it.

It also doubles as the love theme for his budding romance with Sue and it overlaps with a reprise of the opening theme to build “Bolero”-style in the final, memorable sequence when Sue professes her love to Mick across a packed Columbus Circle subway platform, aided by some helpful New Yorkers. The guitar is fuzzed out and played as if it were a didgeridoo, then the “Never Never Land” theme becomes a full orchestral string section and it becomes not just a satisfying moment but a euphoric one. It’s so evocative of place and character and evolution that you’re almost tempted to compare all other rom-com scores negatively to “Crocodile Dundee” and say, “That’s not a score. That’s a score.” —CB

18. “Robocop” (Composed by Basil Poldouris, 1987)

If an old-fashioned orchestral score by Jerry Goldsmith for “Total Recall” would help bring a sweeping end to the ’80s synth revolution, “Robocop” is a joyful case of Paul Verhoeven embracing all the trimmings of sci-fi. The aesthetics of Basil Poledouris’s man-vs-machine score illustrate the musical tensions of the day: crashing man-made instrument sounds against slick synthesizers (someone could make a movie about the potential perils of an over-technological society). Poldouris’ 50-second main title theme begins with low, imposing strings before a zippy synth piles on the terror. It’s not a note; it’s a noise.

If Poldouris’ score sounds a bit like Mozart’s requiem (and not the fun bits), that’s because it’s funeral music, too. Our undead protagonist Alex (Peter Weller), who inflicts justice on society as a perfect new form of law enforcement, is arguably one of the most tragic characters in cinema. A zombified carcass of a person who should definitely have died when he was shot through every part of his body must live on as the tool of an evil corporation. Poldouris’ faux-heroic string motif that kicks in sporadically isn’t miles off Danny Elfman’s GOAT candidate “Spider-Man” score, but the sinister synths underneath stop it ever feeling like a theme any character would want to have. It’s one of the most thought-through scores of the decade, and certainly one of the best. —AS

17. “Risky Business” (Composed by Tangerine Dream, 1983)

Tangerine Dream only contributed two original pieces — along with three remixes of their previous material — to the soundtrack of Paul Brickman’s all-time adolescent fantasy, but they dominate the collective memory of “Risky Business” almost as completely as sex dominates the minds of its high school characters. The German band’s seductive electronica was immaculately suited for this super horny story of suburban teenage lust, which in its own way can be as intense and harrowing as cracking a safe, driving a truck full of nitroglycerine, or doing any of the other filmic activities that Tangerine Dream had already been asked to score at that point.

No music cue has more palpably captured the anxiety of first contact than “Love on a Train,” its trembling neon synths crystallizing the once-in-a-lifetime moment that stretches between the inevitable and the unimaginable; between Lana guiding Joel onto that train, and Joel realizing its final destination (Brickman’s decision to lead into it with Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” is nothing less than one of the most inspired choices in the history of modern art, hyperbole be damned). Earlier, “The Dream Is Always the Same” — jittery and percolating with expectation — sets the tone for a movie that’s attuned to the siren song of teenage possibility, and its irresistible ability to lure fresh-faced kids like Joel Goodsen towards their ultimate fantasies the moment their parents go out of town for the weekend. —DE

16. “Octopussy” (Composed by John Barry, 1983)

For a five-time Oscar winner, it still doesn’t feel like John Barry gets enough respect. The reality is that everyone should be hailing the way he shaped the sound of the James Bond franchise the way people do with John Williams and “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones.” The British composer created the lush, sensual scores for 11 Bond films, stretching from 1963 to 1987 (he also arranged Monty Norman’s main “James Bond Theme” for the very first Bond film, “Dr. No,” in 1962).

Barry reached a particular peak near the end of his Bond run. Marvel at how he turns Duran Duran’s industrial-pop “A View to a Kill” title song into the anthemic, instrumental “Fanfare and Hazard” in that score, a true last blast of heroism for Roger Moore’s Bond. Delight in how his music is so beautiful it basically brings the plot to a stop for two whole minutes in “Moonraker.” But it’s his orchestral transformation of Rita Coolidge’s pop song “All Time High” for “Octopussy” that reaches the most sublime level of beauty amid the smirking double entendres of the Moore era. The Bond films are all about sex, sexiness, and sexy times, but, powered by those supple, soaring strings, this is truly romantic music — the kind to lose your heart over.

Barry had done this once before, with the “We Have All the Time in the World” instrumental theme from “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” Because that’s a better film, with a more meaningful romance for Bond, that song has become more cherished over the years — it was even reused to swooning effect in “No Time to Die.” “Octopussy” isn’t a bad film (no movie in which counterfeit Faberge eggs are somehow linked to a plot to start World War III ever could be), but it doesn’t reach the same, er, heights otherwise achieved by its “All Time High” instrumental. Turning a Rita Coolidge pop trifle into a work of orchestral art? That’s the kind of alchemy that explains how the Bond franchise has survived for 60 years. —CB 

15. “The Thing” (Composed by Ennio Morricone, 1982)

As recognizable and unsettling as any movie cue ever written, Ennio Morricone’s profoundly simple theme for “The Thing” finds the legendary Italian composer trying to emulate the synth-driven minimalism that John Carpenter had used on “Escape from New York.” It was an approach that reflected the story of “The Thing” itself, and through that process of sonic assimilation Morricone created something that feels at once both completely alien and also as if it’s been hiding inside us all along.

That one indelible track is so well-deployed throughout the film that it can overshadow the rest of Morricone’s contributions, many of which are used as ambient wallpaper, but all of which fortify the sense of ambiguous fear that seeps into the story from all sides. The violent strings in particular give “Shape” to a collision between classic horror and wholly contemporary social distrust, a tension that Morricone deepens with the go-for-broke pleasure of someone who hasn’t been asked to resolve it. —DE

14. “Chariots of Fire” (Composed by Vangelis, 1981)

Most iconic score for a sports film ever? How can you not hear those cascading chords of Vangelis’ title theme for “Chariots of Fire” and not picture pasty Brits clad in white athletic outfits running barefoot through the surf? It became so associated with U.K. sport and the Olympics in general that it was picked as the medal ceremony theme at the 2012 London Games a full 30 years after the release of Hugh Hudson’s film. It even reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in the wake of the film winning Best Original Score (as well as Best Picture) at the Oscars.

But the score is much more than the title theme. Listen to “Abraham’s Theme,” a bit of minimalist electronica that starts off sounding like an anguished birdcall, something which captures the agony of the Jewish athlete Harold Abraham’s struggle to be accepted by Britain’s antisemitic upper crust even as he wins the gold medal for the 100 meter dash. Or the track “100 metres” itself, abstract and unmelodic, like the disorienting sound of actually competing in an Olympic event you’re so hyped up for you may be dissociating. It’s pure anxiety, the sound of blood rushing in your ears, all noises blurred into a kind of tinnitus. People thought this movie was safe and traditional?

Well, its music certainly isn’t, as much as the success of the title track was held against it. Using all electronic arrangements helps to place the entire film out of time. Listen to “Eric’s Theme” where a synthesizer replicates the sound of bagpipes to give a Scottish tinge. It’s otherworldly and triumphant, and sad too. Vangelis gave a very melancholy flavor to everything here except for the title theme — as one character says, winning is “pretty difficult to swallow” — which anticipates something we’ve come to better appreciate in the decades since: that depression, and deep mental health struggles, often follow Olympic triumph. The price of gold can be steep indeed. —CB 

13. “The Shining” (Composed by Wendy Carlos & Rachel Elkind, 1980)

It’s a testament to Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s genius that, in spite of the fact that Stanley Kubrick only ended up using two of the many finished tracks they wrote for his Stephen King adaptation, a list such as this would still be woefully incomplete without their contributions to “The Shining” on it — as incomplete as their score itself, which remained “lost” until Carlos herself released the missing pieces herself in 2005. The composers were as furious with Kubrick as “2001: A Space Odyssey” composer Alex North had been when he arrived at the world premiere to discover that his entire score had been scrapped in favor of the classical music cues that immediately became synonymous with the film, and maybe even more so once they realized that they had no recourse to sue (I don’t know who needs to hear this, but never make a handshake deal with Stanley Kubrick).

Either way, the fact remains that Kubrick got exactly what he needed. Using a MOOG synthesizer to emulate the tone of a demonically possessed church organ, Carlos and Elkind’s iconic theme — a portentous but open-ended series of rolling farts that soundtrack Jack Torrance’s drive through the mountains that lead to the Overlook Hotel — creates the palpable sense of slow-burning madness. The instrumentation’s atemporal mish-mash beautifully anticipates a ghost story in which the past doesn’t haunt the present so much as it becomes it, while the sawing wail that creeps into the mix sounds like a dying cat or a crying child, as if little Danny were trying to warn us away from this place. The other surviving track, “Rocky Mountains,” is even more dissonant, and its inhuman warble cements the mood of a film whose psychic horror troubles the mind in order to make your skin crawl. —DE

12. “Ran” (Composed by Toru Takemitsu, 1985)

Many luminary filmmakers, as they reach old age, produce smaller and more intimate films as a way of reflecting on their legacy in a personal fashion, and sometimes because they’re tired. Take the Frank Capra era of Steven Spielberg in which we’re still basking, or Paul Schrader’s lone man in a hotel room trilogy. Having struggled in the 1970s, Akira Kurosawa was not going to be that guy. He returned to prominence after “Star Wars” whetted Westerners’ appetite for a type of movie he’d almost single-handedly invented, and never looked back. “Ran” is the culmination of his bounce-back, and its score fitfully big-scale too. Tōru Takemitsu’s score is not far from a symphony of its own: well over an hour of orchestral music tracks the emotional beats of twisted king and his warring sons.

One mark of a great score is that the quiet — even silence — is on the track, rather than letting the director or music supervisor turn it off for a few minutes. And Takemitsu, like Kurosawa, was not one to mess around. His century’s most important Japanese composer, Kurosawa was frankly lucky to get him, and gained his signature as far back as 1976. The Sapporo Symphony Orchestra was hired after Kurosawa wisely abandoned initial plans to record with London musicians. It helps make “Ran”‘s a profoundly coherent and authentic piece of work, Japan’s premier musicians playing feudal Japanese music for a Japanese film that would help restore the nation’s greatest filmmaker. Its impact was almost as big as its size. —AS

11. “Blade Runner” (Composed by Vangelis, 1982)

“Blade Runner” is first and foremost a sensual experience (all the better to reflect the film’s preoccupation with defining what it means to be human), and Vangelis seemed to understand that fact as if it were coded into him from birth. Pivoting from the mechanical gyrations of his “Chariots of Fire” score, the late Greek composer embraced the eros inherent to Ridley Scott’s retro-futuristic Philip K. Dick adaptation, creating a woozy but tender soundscape that effectively captures the sound of an android trying to solve the mystery of its own creation.

Tracks like “Wait for Me” hear smoky jazz saxophones ribbon around a trilling synth like a fog of invented memories, while “Blush Response” gives flesh to a cyberpunk world that seems part-machine itself, thus framing the search for Replicants as an act of profound self-denial. And then there’s that famous “Love Theme” (feat. saxophonist Dick Morrissey), which anticipates the wistfulness that Yoko Kanno would eventually bring to the Jupiter episodes of “Cowboy Bebop,” and the kind of digital pas de deux between innocence and tragedy that Angelo Badalamenti would soon weaponize in “Twin Peaks.” —DE

10. “The Last Temptation of Christ” (Composed by Peter Gabriel, 1988)

Martin Scorsese’s great project with “The Last Temptation of Christ” was to defamiliarize the story of the Gospel, to feel its message with a new urgency that’s been lost in rote contemporary Catholic and Protestant services. Part of that project meant detaching the Christ story from the Eurocentric way it’s become best known in Western culture. This is a Middle Eastern story after all — a story of colonialism and resistance.

To that end, Peter Gabriel composed a score drawing from an extremely diverse range of contributing artists as ecumenical as organized Christianity aspires to be but seldom is, including non-Christian voices: Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who specialized in Sufi devotional music; Indian violinist L. Shankar; and Senegalese polymath Youssou N’Dour, among them. Gabriel then took his score and turned it into the studio album “Passion,” which helped kick off the Western enthusiasm for world music.

“World music” sometimes is derided as a term. By definition, it lumps wildly different artists from countries far-flung into each other under the same homogenous label — flattening diversity by removing specificity. But the kind of all-embracing global spirit it represents at its best, finding linkages between disparate cultures, is perfectly suited to this tale of the Christ. When an Armenian doudouk trills the opening of “The Feeling Begins,” it’s such a departure from anyone who’s seen earlier Hollywood Biblical epics it puts the mystery back into the story of this singular life that everyone knows but so few seem to understand. —CB 


9. “Paris, Texas” (Composed by Ry Cooder, 1984)

“Paris, Texas” greets us with a broken man wandering through the badlands, incapable of speech but telling us everything we need to know with a face that looks like 40 miles of rough road. By the end, we’ve watched him spill his guts in the anonymity of a nudie booth and fully reckon with the regrets that led him to waste so much time. The slow, transcendental journey — and the gut-wrenching catharsis that it ultimately delivers — is a testament to Wim Wenders’ direction and the copious amounts of humanity that can be contained in Harry Dean Stanton’s face. But Ry Cooder deserves just as much credit for guiding the audience with a sparse score that emotionally dilates and constricts at the same rate as his prickly protagonist.

When we first meet Travis Henderson in those iconic opening shots, Cooder’s harsh slide guitar invokes classic Western scores to paint the image of a silent drifter with a dark secret. The music subtly prompts us to relate to him as an archetype instead of a three-dimensional human being. When combined with the stunning rock formations that dwarf Stanton in size, Wenders is able to send a clear message that we won’t be looking into this man’s soul any time soon. When Travis ever-so-slowly begins to restore his familial relationships, the music appropriately starts to soften. But as it becomes clear that he is utterly incapable of looking inside his own soul — much less communicate his findings to anyone — the music shies away from familiar motifs and pivots in an ambient direction. By the time he’s finally ready to process his past, Cooder adds more instrumentation to create the sounds of life-affirming nostalgia without getting bogged down by sentimentality.

The best film composers understand that they’re ultimately subservient to the greater story, and Cooder’s score is the work of a masterful guitarist restraining himself to mirror a broken man’s emotional repression. “Paris, Texas” might be remembered for its silences as much as its music, but Cooder never wastes an opportunity to shine light through each emotional door that Stanton cracks open. —CZ

8. “The Natural” (Composed by Randy Newman, 1984)

“Buh-BUUUUM! Buh-buh-buh-BUM!” The incredibly hummable main theme of Randy Newman’s score for “The Natural” is as simple yet mythic as the plot of “The Natural” itself. It arrives with the force of the lightning that cleaved the tree from which baseball prodigy Roy Hobbs created his homemade bat. In a decade in which nostalgia culture became enshrined in Hollywood, Newman’s score is a pinnacle of Americana, a kind of musical Norman Rockwell painting.

It’s an extraordinary thing: Newman had made fun of American bigotries and hypocrisies on his seminal 1974 album “Good Old Boys.” Somehow, he was able to find the flip-side, the good in the American character too with “The Natural.” Not that there aren’t a ton of terrible people in a movie full of fame-happy murderers who are out to kill celebrities to be famous themselves, and corporate cheats who stand to win by ensuring that others lose. But Barry Levinson’s film is less concerned with predictable villainy than it is in unexpected heroism, particularly as it’s expressed through sports’ unique ability to raise people above the muck and give even the least athletic among us a glimpse of what we can be if given the chance.

Newman’s score is delicate and ethereal at first, especially in the scenes between Robert Redford’s Hobbs and his childhood love (Glenn Close). But whenever the impossible comes into view, it suddenly crystallizes into that iconic six-note theme; it’s music to accompany a baseball flying into outfield lights, the glass and sparks falling to the ground like rain. It leaves such an impression that, even though they couldn’t get the rights to the exact music, it got its own “Simpsons” parody. —CB 

7. “The Empire Strikes Back” (Composed by John Williams, 1980)

Imagine creating one of the most iconic scores of all time, then throwing almost all of it out for the film’s sequel… because you’ve created an even more iconic score. That’s what John Williams did with “The Empire Strikes Back,” which retains the main “Star Wars” title theme, “Luke’s Theme,” and a few other classic tracks, but also introduces a startling number of new leitmotifs. This is where the saga gets truly Wagnerian.

There’s “The Imperial March,” of course, a rousing anthem of minor-key, goose-stepping menace. The Empire’s theme in the original film, which doubled for the theme of the Death Star, built around a triple beat motif and has a ‘50s sci-fi quality to it. But this one for the sequel — all but replacing the original theme entirely — goes operatic.

As the sequel deepened themes of the first film, so did its music become richer: There’s a romantic love theme with “Han Solo and the Princess,” a new sense of searching spiritual grandeur with “Yoda’s Theme,” the awe-inspiring daredevil music of “The Asteroid Field,” and even the AT-AT walkers get a lumbering theme that, out of context, sounds like it could be paired to the sound of lumbering elephants. The repeating rhythm of “Hyperspace” is a chase theme that every kid who ever played a ‘90s “Star Wars” video game has burned into their brains, while “Departure of Boba Fett” begins with a dirge, as Han’s frozen body is being walked funeral-like to the bounty hunter’s ship, like Williams’ own understated take on “Siegfried’s Funeral March.”

If “Star Wars” mania was spurred by the original film, true “Star Wars” obsession begins with “Empire,” with its music so deep and vast it promises a true galaxy of myth-making to get lost in forever. —CB 

6. “Akira” (Composed by Tsutomu Ōhashi, 1988)

Attributing proper credit for the score to Katsuhiro Otomo’s landmark anime is somewhat complicated. The music was performed by the massive Japanese music collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi, and composed by their bandleader Shōji Yamashiro, a pseudonym for conductor — and agricultural scientist(!?) — Tsutomu Ōhashi, who must not have wanted his peers to know that he was cross-pollinating with the creative world. Appreciating the score for “Akira,” on the other hand, couldn’t possibly be easier. Film music seldom feels big enough to seize your imagination and grab hold of your entire body at the same time, but Ōhashi’s score needs only a few bars to convey the feeling that Neo-Tokyo is about to E.X.P.L.O.D.E..

Inspired by the glassy percussion of Indonesian gamelan music and the distressed rhythms of Noh theater, the iconic first cue (“Kaneda”) flushes Otomo’s cyberpunk epic full of volatile energy as it accelerates towards an explosion; it’s beautiful, even when racing headlong towards death. Later tracks, like the plonky and unholy “Tetsuo” sound like watching a nuclear explosion through the stained glass windows of a church, while “Dolls’ Polyphony” captures the film’s psychic distress through the ears of the children who bring it to fruition. It’s one of several examples in which the polyphonic size of Geinoh Yamashirogumi creates the impression of a singularity in motion, the music building towards an unsustainable scale until the final “Requiem” finds that only the human voice remains. —DE

5. “The Last Emperor” (Composed by David Byrne, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Cong Su, 1987)

This uniquely collaborative score reflects the push-pull of influences in the life of Pu Yi himself. Sakamoto opens the scene of the emperor’s “First Coronation” with traditional Chinese instruments, the zither-like guqin and dizi flute, then moves into a Western orchestral arrangement to express the main pageantry theme, if with a Chinese-sounding minor key crescendo: Pu Yi was torn among multiple worlds, after all — his Manchu heritage, his hundreds of millions of Han Chinese subjects, the Western education he received from an English tutor, and, of course, Japan, which re-installed him as emperor of their conquered territory “Manchukuo” in the 1930s.

Sakamoto, who died in March this year, pulled from his background in electronic music to give a pulsating feeling of forward momentum to tracks like “Open the Door” and “Where Is Armo?” over which he layered another Chinese instrument, the violin-like erhu. His work on the score slips seamlessly into David Byrne’s own tracks, which, as expected, have a much more prominent rhythm section to each. It’s Byrne’s version of the main “Last Emperor” theme that opens the movie over the credits. And Cong Su contributes a starkly atmospheric track, entirely using Chinese instruments, titled “Lunch.”

Other than for actual movie musicals, it’s rare for a movie with three composers to have won the Oscar for Best Original Score. But “The Last Emperor” is unthinkable without the contributions from each; their work provides overlapping fields of emotion to drive the narrative of this singular life, one that spanned such extremes as to almost be incomprehensible, while (mostly) avoiding sentimentalizing Pu Yi, a figure who does not deserve it. —CB 

4. “Koyaanisqatsi” (Composed by Philip Glass, 1982)

One of the most subtly ubiquitous film scores ever written (its compositions having appeared in countless other movies, commercials, and television shows as far-removed as “Stranger Things” and “Love Island”), the revolutionary suite of music that Godfrey Reggio’s “Koyaanisqatsi” inspired from Philip Glass might be thought of as a kind of proto “OK Computer” for how orgiastically it articulated the ever-accelerating pace of life in the late 20th century.

But where that Radiohead masterpiece started with a car crash and tried to make sense of the chaos on the fly, Reggio’s film takes the long view of civilization, which invites Glass to begin his score with primordial grumblings and chanting voices low enough to sound like they’re bellowing straight out of the earth. When human technology reaches terminal velocity, Glass’ music somehow manages to keep pace with our self-destruction, his compositions lapping over themselves in a race of repetitive structures that mirror the relentless, mechanical flow of movement and production in a world that moves too fast for anyone to get a rest from all the unborn chicken voices in their head.

Minimalist in their design but maximalist in their effect, pieces like “Resource” or the 18-minute “The Grid” feel like nothing less than the sonic equivalent of time-lapse photography — frenzied and addictive. Eventually this musical supercollider creates enough momentum to cause a singularity, at which point aloof its chaos is usurped by the funereal sounds of an organ that’s just begging us to slow down. Idiot, slow down. —DE

3. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (Composed by John Williams, 1981)

It’s a throwback, it’s a thrill ride, it’s a character piece, it’s a “punching Nazis” extravaganza, but where “Raiders of the Lost Ark” truly becomes a transcendent work of art is with John Williams’ score: something so grand it feels like it really does open a portal to the divine and channels the wrath of Yahweh in all its vengeful glory.

Of course, there’s the jaunty title theme for Indiana Jones himself, which Williams cobbled together out of two separate main themes he proposed to Steven Spielberg. If ever there was music to accompany a heroic figure being dragged under a truck Yakima Canutt-style or scurrying atop the cars of a moving train, it’s this. And there’s the love theme, tender, full of swooning strings. But it’s really the theme for the Ark of the Covenant itself that elevates Williams’ score to the cosmic.

It’s introduced in the track “Washington Men” in a choral version: three descending notes repeated twice, followed by a six note variation. Then it reaches a particular orchestral grandeur as “The Map Room: Dawn” in which the cosmos really do align to point Indy on his way. And finally in “The Miracle of the Ark” after some of the most jagged, horror-sounding moments of any Williams score, as the full power of God reveals itself in its Pentateuchal violence, it returns again as a kind of crescendo for the whole movie — with enough force to suggest the horrors of the 20th century really can be best understood through the lens of Old Testament fury. —CB 

2. “Do the Right Thing” (Composed by Bill Lee, 1989)

Other than Carmine and Francis Ford Coppola’s work together on “Apocalypse Now,” Bill Lee’s score for “Do the Right Thing” has to represent the cinema’s most successful collaboration of a composer father and his director son. Sure, everyone rightly thinks about Public Enemy and “Fight the Power” when considering the music of Spike Lee’s masterpiece, but his father’s score powers some of the most moving moments of the film.

Think of the emotional undercurrent the aptly titled “Father to Son” lends to the extended dialogue scene in which Danny Aiello’s Sal tells his racist son Pino (John Turturro) about how he loves his Bed-Stuy neighborhood and the people in it. It starts with four tinkly notes of the piano leading into a melancholy string melody, which Branford Marsalis’s saxophone then picks up. The smooth ‘50s jazz conveys Sal’s outpouring of affection for his community, before a hi-hat chimes in and Marsalis goes into a hard bop improvisation, reflecting Pino’s brittle, chaotic edge.

A number of the characters in “Do the Right Thing” have specific themes and instruments associated with them: bass cello for Da Mayor, a piano for Mookie — sometimes with a full jazz septet to reflect the hustle of his day, sometimes just the piano alone when he gets reflective. And of course, there’s the elder Lee’s extraordinary orchestral exit music, two saxophones and a trumpet in dialogue as contradictory quotes from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X close the film.

Bill Lee died on May 24 of this year. His accomplishments as a jazz musician — and his astonishing number of collaborations, Duke Ellington, Billy Holiday, Harry Belafonte, and Simon and Garfunkel among them — are too many to mention. But with “Do the Right Thing” he also has an everlasting place in cinema history. —CB 

1. “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” (Composed by Philip Glass, 1985)

Yukio Mishima, arguably one of the top five ultra-nationalist author/playwright/models who ever founded his own militia and committed public seppuku after trying to overthrow Japan’s constitution, devoted the thrust of his adult life to what he described as “the harmony between pen and sword.” His ambition — which became his suicide mission — was to make his art his life and his life his art, a synthesis realized with visceral force in Paul Schrader’s kaleidoscopic “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.” Want to separate the art from the artist? When it comes to Mishima, you’re going to need a very sharp sword.

Schrader may not have seen eye-to-eye with Mishima’s politics, but there’s no doubt that the man who wrote the likes of “First Reformed” and “Taxi Driver” respected his subject’s commitment to the cause, and every aspect of his film — from its flamboyant set design to its very structure, which translates the author’s personal history through the text of his fiction — goes to delirious extremes in order to hear the harmony that Mishima had listened for all of his life. That’s especially and ecstatically true of Philip Glass’ score, which spares no creative expense to articulate, and then unify, the various aspects of Mishima’s persona. “I felt that the film was coming apart,” Glass once said, “like there was centrifugal motion in the filmmaking itself, which had to be complemented in some way. I thought of the music as rubber bands that pull the story together.”

That elasticity was made possible through the use of several different ensembles (i.e. a string quartet for the more lyrical meta-narratives, and a percussion section for the militaristic sequences that lead to Mishima’s suicide), and through Glass’ decision to reinterpolate the score’s most identifiable motifs across different genres (i.e. surf rock for “Kyoko’s House”), which allows the music to serve as a bridge between the film’s wildly different aesthetics. Mishima was a protean soul, constantly shedding his skin in the hopes of eventually bearing his soul, and Glass’ approach allows the movie to feel prismatic and holistic all at once, like a single ray of light refracted in a thousand directions.

True to the composer’s idea of his score as a device capable of binding the movie together, it’s the music that captures the harmony that Mishima died to achieve. That harmony is most euphoric in the slow-building main theme of Glass’ score, which gradually ingests all of its different components until it finally erupts into a big bang of strings, bells, and synths, all of them swirling around each other like ribbons of fire around the sun that rises behind Mishima’s final avatar as he sticks a knife into his guts — the film being sewn together just as its hero opens himself up. Mishima probably would’ve loved the sound of that. —DE

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