"John Carter" by Michael Giacchino

For several years now, Michael Giacchino has been the go-to guy for scoring big Hollywood adventures, and with him about to hit Gotham City for Matt Reeves' "The Batman" it's a good idea to get reacquainted with his marvelous music for Edgar Rice Burroughs by way of Andrew Stanton. "John Carter" was savaged by the media before it even came out and wasn't helped by Disney's substandard marketing, but it remains a funny and exciting ride with an awful lot of heart, much of which comes from Giacchino's score. It's a wonderfully broad score with several themes representing the different factions as well as star-crossed lovers John Carter and Dejah Thoris, and it's a joy to listen to, full of romance and high adventure and an armful of emotion. It's a shame that it looks like Giacchino will never get to revisit that universe, but all the more reason to treasure this score.

"Steve Jobs" by Daniel Pemberton



British composer Daniel Pemberton has become a force in the world of film scoring, diversifying himself for such projects as "The Counselor," "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.", and "Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse," all of which have allowed him to experiment and tinker to his heart's content. Danny Boyle's biopic of Apple bigwig Steve Jobs is set into three acts in three distinct eras, and Pemberton takes full advantage of this, using a unique sound for each differing time—so for the early Apple era he uses purely analog pre-1985 synthesizers, the middle section is designed as a mini-opera, and the final act is all digital. The ingenuity in this alone is quite brilliant, but Pemberton is also able to keep a high level of quality across all three eras, which results in a spectacular and incredibly effective score.

"The Red Turtle" by Laurent Perez del Mar

Despite having Studio Ghibli's name attached, Michaël Dudok de Wit's animated masterpiece is more of a co-production, albeit one that began at the request of Ghibli godfather Hayao Miyazaki (after seeing de Wit's 2000 Oscar-winning short "Father and Daughter".) What immediately makes "The Red Turtle" stand out from the rest is that it is almost completely wordless, preferring to tell its story of a shipwrecked man and the turtle-girl he falls in love with through visuals and Laurent Perez del Mar's score. Playing a crucial role in the narrative, the score is introduced slowly—conveying an early sense of danger from nature as our protagonist acclimatizes to the island, and plinks of string and xylophone as a group of hatchlings venture into the sea for the first time—and ramps up to the moment where the turtle-girl appears. The score matches the look of the island evocatively, with exotic woodwinds and percussion, but never overwhelming, and what you take away is an overwhelming feeling of serenity. It's a beautiful and intimate score for a wonderful film.



