It’s been a rough year or so for fans of great genre movie and TV music. Iconic composers of classic adventure, sci-fi and horror themes have mournfully passed on, causing many to look and listen back to what was. But, it’s important to recognize their accomplishments — along with the ongoing contributions of composing giants […]

For years, the soundtrack business was a sleepy corner of the industry.
Apart from the occasional standout hit — think “Titanic” — most compilation soundtracks seemed irrelevant. But of late, a reawakening has occurred, and Robert Kraft, as president of Fox Music, has been on the front lines. Three of Fox’s soundtracks reside in the top […]

 
It’s been 12 years since his last American Top 40 hit — and a decade since he began making headlines for his increasingly troubled personal life — but George Michael is making a quietly endearing comeback stateside thanks to his offbeat appearances on ABC’s legal dramedy Eli Stone. Since popping up as a singing vision […]

 
It’s a collaboration of two of the most galvanizing voices in the history of film and music.
In the fall of 2006, legendary director Martin Scorsese decided to film iconic rockers The Rolling Stones over a two-day period at the intimate Beacon Theater in New York City. The two-day event was a benefit for the Clinton […]

 
Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese is knee-deep in his new film, an adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s thriller “Shutter Island” starring Leonard DiCaprio and Ben Kingsley, among others. And he’s stumped. Just a little.
“This new movie is set in 1954,” he says in comic exasperation. “No Rolling Stones!”
Fans of the filmmaker will understand his consternation. Long before […]

 
Most film music written today is terrible, with few scores lingering in the memory like the underwater menace of Jaws or the whimsical Moon River from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, top composers have told The Times.
Hans Zimmer, who wrote the music for the Hollywood box-office hits Gladiator and The Lion King, dismissed the majority of contemporary […]

 
Randall Poster has one of the best jobs in Hollywood, compiling soundtracks for some of the coolest movies for over a decade. Renowned for his work with director Wes Anderson, with whom he has collaborated since Bottle Rocket in 1996, Poster came up with the really, really good-sounding piano-key-necktie soundtrack to Ben Stiller’s Zoolander (2001), […]

 
In 1976, when he was 19, Daniel Day-Lewis, who is British and was trained in the grand theatrical tradition of Shakespeare and the classics, saw “Taxi Driver” and, despite the considerable weight and seeming obligation of his heritage, realized that what he longed to be was an American actor. “It was a real illumination,” Day-Lewis told […]

There was a time around 1997 when no matter where you were — in the car, on the StairMaster, at the dentist’s office — you couldn’t help but hear “My Heart Will Go On,” the soaring Celine Dion ballad from “Titanic.”
Resistance was futile. It did go on, and on, and on — an example not […]