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   CURRENT NUMBER OF:
     • Years Online: 28
    • Editorial Reviews: 2,270
   • Unique Albums Covered: 3,301
  • Reader Messages Posted: 492,180
 • Reader Votes Cast: 2,606,571


   CURRENT BEST-SELLING SCORES:
       1. The Wild Robot
      2. Solo: A Star Wars Story
     3. Dune: Part Two
    4. Avatar: The Way of Water
   5. Cutthroat Island
  6. The Mask of Zorro
 7. Tomorrow Never Dies
8. Willow
   CURRENT MOST POPULAR REVIEWS:
         1. Batman (1989)
        2. Beetlejuice
       3. Alice in Wonderland
      4. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
     5. Spider-Man
    6. Raiders of the Lost Ark
   7. Doctor Strange: Multiverse
  8. LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring
 9. Titanic
10. Justice League
Moana 2
Gladiator II
Blitz
Red One
Here
Venom: The Last Dance
Covering the best and worst of original film and television music from America's Big Sky Country since 1996, Filmtracks is your spirited home for comprehensive, humorous, and controversial soundtrack reviews. Join our community to support this niche music genre!
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12/13/24 Arsène Lupin   (Debbie Wiseman)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
Buy it... on either of its albums if you seek one of the most engaging, powerful, and thrilling orchestral action scores to be produced during the 2000's.
Avoid it... if immense Gothic style, deep bass resonance, and relentless brass layers cause you only headaches, no matter their elegance and sophistication.
12/9/24 The Long Goodbye   (John Williams)
All New Review
Buy it... only if you appreciate the unique strategy employed by the director for the soundtrack of this film, a single bluesy jazz song adapted for nearly every moment of music in the picture, even source material.
Avoid it... if you've heard that one song and receive no emotional response from it, because the bevy of its instrumental variations are unlikely to change your mind.
12/6/24 Uncommon Valor   (James Horner)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
Buy it... on the official 2010 or 2024 albums if you seek cleaner sound quality for the score's famous Star Trek-derived action cues from the climax of the film.
Avoid it... if you expect the challenging and arguably racist, stereotypical instrumental applications in the first two-thirds of the score to compete in any manner whatsoever with the unoriginal but still entertaining aforementioned action highlights.
12/2/24 The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing   (John Williams/Michel Legrand)
All New Review
Buy it... on its sole album for an excellent survey of the moderately decent John Williams score and wretched Michel Legrand rejected score for this picture.
Avoid it... if you hope to hear Williams express the same enthusiasm or appeal in the western genre as he mustered for The Reivers and The Cowboys.
11/29/24 What Lies Beneath   (Alan Silvestri)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
Buy it... if you are prepared to appreciate a technically adept adaptation of Bernard Herrmann's score from Psycho for the horror sequences in What Lies Beneath.
Avoid it... if the surprisingly and disappointingly mundane and sparse orchestration of Alan Silvestri's suspense cues for the first half of the film cannot compensate for those snappy moments of Herrmann inspiration later on.
11/25/24 The Paper Chase   (John Williams)
New/Updated Review, Separated From a Dual Review
Buy it... for its charming but somewhat anonymous love theme, which dominates the short score in John Williams' comfortable, early 1970's methodology.
Avoid it... if you strive to hear satisfying substance in the suspense and comedy portions of the score, these passages losing their battle with surrounding source music.
11/22/24 Honey, I Shrunk the Kids   (James Horner)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
Buy it... if you are absolutely prepared for a wacky tone of exuberant children's music clearly inspired by Raymond Scott, Carl Stalling, Danny Elfman, and James Horner's own familiar styles.
Avoid it... if you have little patience for scores that fail to combine their many strikingly disparate parts into a cohesive listening experience on album.
11/18/24 Cinderella Liberty   (John Williams)
All New Review
Buy it... if you have a soft spot for John Williams' 1960's light drama and romance sound, Cinderella Liberty translating it into a bluesy breeze for harmonica.
Avoid it... if you expect much substance to this score outside of its two soft, song-represented themes, the remainder functioning as barroom source material.
11/15/24 The Mask of Zorro   (James Horner)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
Buy it... if you admire James Horner's career and wish to hear him take his trademark style of writing in a splashy and fascinatingly different ethnic direction, resulting in one of the most engaging and flavorful action scores of the digital era.
Avoid it... if you have no love for Latin instrumentation or were not impressed by the more robust and mature evolution of this score in The Legend of Zorro.
11/11/24 The Sugarland Express   (John Williams)
All New Review
Buy it... if you have an intellectual curiosity for John Williams' diverse but mostly understated character score that opened his collaboration with Steven Spielberg.
Avoid it... if you expect this score to express a convincingly dramatic heart despite having the harmonica and guitar solos to make that happen.
11/8/24 Species   (Christopher Young)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
Buy it... if you appreciate Christopher Young's usual intelligent combination of wondrous, thematic beauty and jarring horror techniques.
Avoid it... if you've been enticed by the score's beautiful opening seven minutes and expect the entire work to reflect that style of tonal fantasy appeal, only a handful of other cues refraining from dissonant thrashing.
11/4/24 Earthquake   (John Williams)
All New Review
Buy it... only for John Williams' album rearrangements where his two primary themes are allowed time to develop in variations that don't exist in the film version of the score.
Avoid it... if you have no interest in hearing the least appealing disaster score of this era from Williams, a short and fragmented effort that struggles to form a cohesive narrative due to questionable strategy.
11/1/24 Nightbreed   (Danny Elfman)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
Buy it... on any album if you seek the most creatively adventurous and instrumentally diverse horror score of Danny Elfman's early career.
Avoid it... if only fifteen minutes of thematic beauty and fantasy intrigue cannot compensate for an onslaught of brutal symphonic horror material that otherwise dominates the work.
10/28/24 The Eiger Sanction   (John Williams)
All New Review
Buy it... if you appreciate John Williams' larger orchestral scores from his standard, early 1970's blend of suspense, action, and contemporary romance.
Avoid it... if you have little tolerance for harpsichords in unexpected places, its use as the prominent voice of this score never quite functioning as well as Williams intended.
10/24/24 Filmtracks endorses Kamala Harris for American president
For the third American presidential election cycle in a row, trolls supporting Donald Trump have found their way to this site's Scoreboard and comment areas. In 2016, there was actually a "Donald J. Trump" troll that threatened Filmtracks and its readers with all varieties of insults and sanctions. Back then, it was funny and stupid. Now, it is dangerous.

One of the fundamental traits of a pro-Trump troll at Filmtracks, and certainly elsewhere, is a reliance upon anger, fear, and hate to divide people by race, ethnicity, gender, religion, education, region, sexual preference, and more. It's easier to tout the benefits of authoritarianism when you scare the wits out of people. Trump himself, of course, if the biggest troll of all.

The readership of Filmtracks, like much of America, can discern this fascist rhetoric and dismiss it as buffoonery. But as dumb as some of these trolls can seem, do not forget that their message resonates with a significant portion of the country. There may be a ceiling to the support Trump can muster, but he's already proven that ceiling to be high enough to win. Polls now show he will win again.

Kamala Harris has been demonized relentlessly by Trump's army of trolls, foreign and domestic. They fear a powerful and intelligent woman of color, and they prey successfully upon carelessness and collective amnesia. Don't let these trolls discourage you from remembering the stark choice here. America's electoral system is imperfect, but it works, regardless of what the trolls tell you. Vote!

-- Christian Clemmensen, Filmtracks owner and editor
10/22/24 Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny   (John Williams)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
Buy it... if you are prepared to be impressed by John Williams' ability to maintain his high standards of adventure and romanticism in this rousing conclusion to a nostalgic franchise.
Avoid it... on the album if you expect a satisfying presentation of the music heard in the film, Williams emphasizing suite arrangements that don't always reflect the personality of the score itself.
10/20/24 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull   (John Williams)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
Buy it... if you consider yourself any fan of John Williams or the Indiana Jones franchise whatsoever, for despite its flaws, this score is a fun encounter with an old friend.
Avoid it... if you require this score to rival the classic Raiders of the Lost Ark or be as coherent and memorable as any of the previous scores in the franchise.
10/18/24 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade   (John Williams)
Updated Review, With Additional Album
Buy it... on the inadequate 1989 album if you are willing to tolerate substandard sound quality and only half of the impressive but not overwhelming music written by John Williams for the film.
Avoid it... even on the 2008 and 2024 expanded, remastered editions if you absolutely demand the complete score for the film, because even the longer 2008 set is missing more than 20 minutes of material.
2012 FILMTRACKS NOMINEE: The Amazing Spider-Man
The Amazing Spider-Man
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Mufasa Score by Metzger Britell Lebo M   Expand
Tasos B. - December 14, 2024, at 4:48 a.m.
3 messages  (121 views) - Newest: December 14, 2024, at 8:32 a.m. by Peter G.
Lee Holdridge's fuck face while conducting   Expand
The Frog - December 13, 2024, at 5:44 p.m.
5 messages  (175 views) - Newest: December 14, 2024, at 8:56 a.m. by AhN
Synchrotones reviews The Brutalist by Daniel Blumberg   Expand
PT - December 13, 2024, at 12:01 p.m.
7 messages  (171 views) - Newest: December 14, 2024, at 4:34 a.m. by Tasos B.
Movie Music UK reviews THE PAGEMASTER by James Horner - Throwback Thirty!
Jonathan Broxton - December 13, 2024, at 9:46 a.m.
1 message  (59 views)
First cue from “Kraven the Hunter”   Expand
The Lone Rider. - December 13, 2024, at 8:14 a.m.
3 messages  (235 views) - Newest: December 13, 2024, at 2:18 p.m. by Eric
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Review and site status: first half of 2024
Christian Clemmensen - July 27, 2024, at 10:41 a.m.
1 update  (2856 views)
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