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Redemption
Dario Marianelli
Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises writer Steven Knight’s directorial debut stars Jason Statham as a renegade special ops soldier turned avenging vigilante in the heart of London’s seedy underworld.» Read full feature
Trading the florid, classical stylings of his Pride and Prejudice, Atonement and Anna Karenina scores for the grittier intonations of a modern crime film, Dario Marianelli takes an uncharacteristically subdued approach – less percussive and more overtly emotional than is typical for the genre. Tracks like “Getting Better,” with its nervous yet soulful strings and tentative, suspenseful bass highlight the film’s rich tapestry of conflicted, constrained emotions. Even more traditionally percussive and electronic-industrial tracks like “Do You Want to Work” and “Joey’s Career” evoke a kind of colorful, interior melancholy whereas “Nun in Red” and “At the Ballet” opt for the pure, unreconstructed emotional power of the orchestra. -
A Royal Affair
Gabriel Yared, Cyrille Aufort
The legendary 18th Century affair between Denmark’s British-born Queen Caroline Matilda (Alicia Vikander) and the court physician Struensee (Mads Mikkelsen), confidant to her mentally-ill husband King Christian VII (Mikkel Følsgaard), is the subject of director Nikolaj Arcel’s opulent, acclaimed 2012 Danish Oscar nominee.» Read full feature
With this unusual collaboration between Oscar-winning (for The English Patient) veteran Gabriel Yard and former Alexandre Desplat orchestrator Cyrille Aufort, a powerful Gallic tandem is born, a classic orchestral score that evokes not only the best in Arcel’s magnificent film but the very best of contemporary European film music. Fluid orchestrations highlighted by velvety string arrangements in such tracks as “Summer Castle” and “Love Scene” bring a sense of contemporary urgency to the film’s unusually prescient philosophical subtext. As the words of Voltaire inspire scandal and invite tragedy among the film’s fated lovers, Aufort’s and Yared’s music redeems them with hope and the timeless vitality of passion. -
The Place Beyond The Pines
Mike Patton
Star Ryan Gosling reteams with Blue Valentine Director Derek Cianfrance in this ambitious 2012 follow-up film that details the ripple effect of fate and destiny in the family lives of two very different men, one (Gosling) a motorcycle stunt performer with a shadowy past, the other (Bradley Cooper) a rookie police officer with a promising future. Eva Mendes, Ray Liotta and Bruce Greenwood round out the all-star cast.» Read full feature
Since seguing into film scoring with 2009’s Crank: High Voltage, former Faith No More lead singer Mike Patton has quickly forged a reputation for his innovative and eclectic approach to the craft. Tackling Cianfrance’s gritty existential epic from the inside-out, Patton’s avant-gardist approach merges synthesizers, guitar and vocals in a series of unconventional arrangements designed to evoke the characters’ ever-changing mental and emotional states. As fate toys unpredictably with the course of human events, Patton toys equally unpredictably with the harmonic convergence of jazz, folk, rock, blues and classical. If the blues-affected backwater moodiness of synth and reverb guitars in “Schenectady” suggests something ominous and foreboding, it’s quickly detoured by the neo-gothic vocal arrangement of “Family Trees” and the gently jazzy romanticism of “Bromance.” Subsequent tracks further stir the unpredictability of Patton’s musically shape-shifting pot: the post-modern Gregorian chant of “Evergreen,” the cacophonous guitar-driven dissonance of “Misremembering,” the thunderous, purgatorial oppression of “Handsome Luke” – a free-flowing musical journey through a volatile, ever-changing minefield of lost hopes, forgotten dreams, lingering nightmares and retributive karma. -
The Host
Antonio Pinto
Oscar-nominee Saoirse Ronan (Atonement, Hanna) stars in writer/director Andrew Niccol’s (Gattaca) adaptation of the Stephanie Meyer (Twilight) novel about one girl’s courageous quest to fight an invasion of aliens determined to take over all human bodies and subjugate their minds.» Read full feature
An elegant, hypnotic fusion of orchestral and electronic, Brazilian composer Antonio Pinto’s (City of God, Lord of War) alternately romantic, suspenseful and elegiac score captures the bittersweet passions aroused by the film’s unusual and challenging dilemma. Injecting intermittent electronic motifs into otherwise traditional, classical orchestrations (“Escape,” “Catch Us,” “I’m Alive”), Pinto shrewdly places a musical exclamation point on the film’s otherwise daunting alien invasion storyline while relying on straightforward orchestral cues like “Into the Caves” to underline its overriding faith in humanity and the resilience of human emotion. -
Welcome to the Punch
Harry Escott
Once considered one of the best unproduced scripts in the UK, “Shifty” writer/director Eran Creevy’s sophomore effort stars Mark Strong as a wanted criminal whose unexpected return to London to help his son puts him back on a collision course with the determined detective (James McAvoy) he previously eluded.» Read full feature
From the slow and steady electronic crescendo of the film’s “Titles” track, the ominous and epic trajectory of Creevy’s film is assured – all part and parcel of “Hardy Candy” and “Shame” composer Harry Escott’s bag of heart-stopping genre tricks. Percussive, pulsating and unrelentingly driven tracks like “St. Botloph’s,” “Burning Hella” and “Gunfire at the Greigo Mar” move the film along like a high-speed train, setting a dramatic stage for the inevitable collision of wills. By contrast, eerily industrial mood tracks like “Off into the Sunset,” “Morgue” and “Punch” almost fade into the sound design, thoughtful interludes that allow the story the chance to inhale before Creevy springs his next unexpected twist or eruption of violence.
