A Great Modern Film Score Is Hard To Find...But Not Impossible

Alfre Woodard from Clemency (2019)

I'm always singing something. Trapped in the house for a few days thanks to icy Texas weather, I've been reminded of all my little idiosyncrasies, including how often I'm humming or outright crooning melodies.  Whether it's "Love the One You're With" or "Come On Up to the House", I'm constantly engaging with my musical side. It's a testament to how much I love music (despite the fact that I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, to quote Tracy Byrd) that my mind is fixated on harmonies. Unsurprisingly, this means I'm also passionate about an area where cinema and music merge: film scores.

When I was a kid, the John Williams DreamWorks SKG logo theme music always transported me away to a world of cinematic wonders. I also endlessly rewatched Fantasia 2000 as a youngster, which further solidified my adoration for fusing orchestral compositions and vibrant cinematic imagery. Since then, I've constantly been enamored with scores, even as this realm frustrates me so much today. Modern American film scores are often frustratingly middling...but all hope is not lost. There are plenty of great scores out there, reaffirming that this creative domain is not a lost cause. Many high-profile examples of film scores are just a bit pitchy (as Randy Jackson would say).

Way way way smarter people than me have broken down the specifics of why post-2010 film scores have struggled to stand out. Every Frame a Painting did a 2016 video related to the Marvel Cinematic Universe's scores that delved into larger issues plaguing the modern score industry. Specifically, there's a heavy adherence to pre-existing "temp music" during editing that directors get too attached to. Composers then find themselves emulating those tracks rather than crafting something exciting and idiosyncratic for a film.

Meanwhile, there's the plague of Remote Control Productions composers dominating the industry. Remote Control is a film score company founded by Hans Zimmer in 1989. Artists connected to this location (many of them having worked under Zimmer) as well as the resources provided by Remote Control provide an enticing opportunity for studios. Zimmer can't be everywhere. However, if you want your big-budget film to sound like The Dark Knight, Dune, The Lion King, or any other blockbuster he composed, here you go. One of Zimmer's tightest comrades (Lorne Balfe, Benjamin Wallfisch, Tom Holkenborg, etc.) can conjure up a score for you here.

Just as Zimmer has made great film scores (his Dune tracks are outstanding), so too have both Remote Control Productions and his proteges created great film scores. Tom Holkenborg's name makes me groan whenever I see it in the opening credits of a film, but his Mad Max: Fury Road score remains masterful. However, the ubiquity of Temu Hans Zimmer composers has been a massive negative for the movie industry for decades now. Outlets like FilmTracks were complaining about the ubiquity of artists like Ramin Djawadi back in 2008. Today, someone like Balfe (one of the most egregious examples of this phenomenon) does a whopping seven films annually in years like 2024.  

No wonder American/British film scores today sound disappointingly samey. Problems like Remote Control Productions veterans and Zimmer's omnipresent influence have festered for so long and instilled an unexciting one-size-fits-all musical approach.

Ah, but let's get to the upbeat part of this musical landscape: the great modern film scores. The best thing you can do for orchestral cinema music is hire composers who aren't exclusively film veterans. The likes of Balfe, Djawadi, Tom Holkenborg, and Wallfisch are trained to emulate Zimmer. Meanwhile, Tamar-kali (whose provided such excellent scores for Dee Rees' various movies and Josephine Decker's Shirley, among others) is a veteran of the punk music world. She could bring a unique perspective to what film music "should" sound like that wasn't just centered on mimicking the Inception and Dark Knight Rises leitmotifs.

Daniel Pemberton, meanwhile, cut his teeth on homemade albums, commercials, video games, and various other low-budget media. Through these experiences (particularly the ramshackle tools used to assemble his first album, Bedroom), Pemberton mastered new levels of creativity, not to mention tremendous artistic versatility. Now, his works like the Spider-Verse compositions or Man from U.N.C.L.E. score sound like they're from wildly different worlds while deploying such creative instrumentation choices. Even after a 10+ years of doing film scores, Pemberton's default influences aren't just repeating what "normal" film scores sound like.

On and on the positive examples go. Past Lives, for example, had a tremendously moving and wistful score courtesy of Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen, a pair of musicians from the rock band Grizzly Bear. Irish DJ David Holmes, meanwhile, is Steven Soderbergh's go-to composer. That means he's responsible for Black Bag's score, one of 2025's greatest musical creations. I could listen to that jazz-inspired score all day, what a tremendously creative reinterpretation of spy movie music. And, of course, we have to recognize Jonny Greenwood and Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross when talking about stupendous film composers who don't exclusively work in this domain.

These 90s rock legends just keep crafting scores that zag whenever you expect them to zig. Greenwood's Spencer score, for example, realized the hallowed halls of Royal Family palaces with ominous jazz-influenced tracks. Reznor & Ross, meanwhile, embraced pulse-pounding trap music for Challengers. Those transportive tracks perfectly sonically reflected the propulsive romantic attraction between that film's three leads. Who can forget their electronic and aching Social Network tracks, which deftly encapsulated the mindset of these tech-driven tormented men who stumbled into changing the world.

Kathryn Bostic's striking and haunting Clemency tracks, meanwhile, merge string-based traditional orchestral melodies with these ominous hums and rumbles. Tracks like "Nightmare 2" make your headphones quiver with their immense bass noises. They sound like visitors from a nightmare realm (fitting for tracks with names like "Nightmare 1"). This bold collision of opposing sounds is an ingenious distillation of a story concerning a human being (represented in the traditional orchestral harmonies) staring down the barrel of the inhumane process of a prison execution (represented in those hums and rumbles). Bostic is more than up for the task of delivering a score matching the tone and artistic mastery of writer/director Chinonye Chukwu's Clemency.

Let's also not forget Jerskin Fendrix, the go-to composer for Yorgos Lanthimos starting with his 2023 film Poor Things. This Greek musician was making incredibly unorthodox melodies for years before he and Lanthimos first hooked up. Once he started composing Emma Stone star vehicles, Fendrix, happily, didn't throw away his strangest tendencies. Instead, his Poor Things compositions are spectacular madness. The soundtrack's opening track "Bella," for instance, deploys the plucking of heavy harp strings that sound at once dreamlike and a little unsettling, a fitting encapsulation of the larger film. 

The sparseness of this track, meanwhile, fits how Bella Baxter's mind is so open and new once she's first resurrected. Subsequent compositions are heavy on screeching instrumentation and big, bold musical declarations. Emotions and visual impulses are mighty pronounced in Poor Things, and Fendrix's score is all too happy to match that maximalist atmosphere. Fendrix's go-for-broke singular musical vision for the Poor Things score is a triumph, not to mention full of noises and harmonies you won't find in any other movie.

We could be here all day talking about great modern film scores that I love (hi Ludwig Göransson and his deeply specific approaches to sonic landscapes). However, what's clear to me is that great modern film scores are risk-takers. They aren't beholden to temp music or repeating what sounded memorable in a movie from two years ago. Whether you're making orchestral compositions for Clemency or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, it's crucial to deliver scores that thrive on the unexpected. Give audiences sounds and harmonies they never thought they'd hear in a tennis movie or a film focused on 1930s Mississippi vampires.

That creativity can be especially potent when hailing from a composer who isn't exclusively experienced in film scores. I'm tired of seeing only Balfe, Holkenborg, Wallfisch, and Djawadi's names in the opening credits of movies. Reach out to unexpected and eclectic musicians (or criminally under-utilized composers like Tamar-kali and Bostic) from all walks of life. Give them the flexibility and room to deliver film scores that upend expectations. Cinema as a whole will prosper from not just seeing Zimmer and his proteges as the be-all end-all of film music. Plus, it'll give me some new melodies to hum while I'm walking around my apartment. Hurry up, though, I think everyone around me is getting sick of hearing me croon "Love The One You're With"!