Archive
ON DEADLY GROUND – Basil Poledouris
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
An action thriller with an environmental protection theme, On Deadly Ground marked the directorial debut of action star Steven Seagal, who was hot off the unexpected critical and commercial success of his previous film Under Siege in 1992. Here Seagal plays Forrest Taft, an expert firefighter who gets involved in a conflict between an unscrupulous Alaska oil company and a local indigenous tribe, whose lands are being damaged by the oil company’s drilling methods and poor safety record. Things escalate when the head of the oil company orders his henchmen to eliminate anyone who knows about his company’s indiscretions, and the tribal leader is murdered; angered by the injustice, Taft teams up with the tribal leader’s daughter to take down the company. Despite an excellent supporting cast that included Joan Chen, John C. McGinley, R. Lee Ermey, a young Billy Bob Thornton, and Michael Caine chewing the scenery as the despicable head of the evil oil company, the film was unfortunately a critical disaster, appearing on many end-of-year ‘worst’ lists; much criticism was leveled at Seagal’s ham-fisted and amateurish direction, as well as the preachy tone of the film’s screenplay. Read more…
AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER – Takeshi Furukawa
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I want to start this review by saying that, for the most part, I am coming to it from a place of complete ignorance. I am aware that there is a very well-loved and popular animated TV show called Avatar: The Last Airbender, which aired on Nickelodeon for three seasons between 2005 and 2008. This show was very loosely adapted into a live-action movie, The Last Airbender, by M. Night Shyamalan in 2010, which was a critical and commercial flop. There was also a sequel TV series, The Legend of Korra, which also aired on Nickelodeon for four seasons from 2012 to 2014. While I did see the Last Airbender movie, I have never seen any episodes of the original animated show, and while I very much liked James Newton Howard’s score for the movie, I have absolutely no experience with the scores for the animated shows, which are by Jeremy Zuckerman and Benjamin Wynn. Read more…
THE UNINVITED – Victor Young
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
During WWII Hollywood began to explore a new genre – paranormal or supernatural themed films. When Irish author Dorothy Macardle’s 1941 novel “Uneasy Freehold” was published in the United States as “The Uninvited” producer Charles Brackett believed he had found a story that needed to be brought to the big screen. He sold his vison to Paramount and would oversee production, Lewis Allen was tasked with directing, and the team of Dodie Smith and Frank Partos would write the screenplay. For the cast, Ray Milland would star as Roderick “Rick” Fitzgerald, joined by Ruth Hussey as Pamela Fitzgerald, Donald Crisp as Commander Beech, Cornelia Otis Skinner as Miss Holloway, and Gail Russel as Stella Meredith. Read more…
IFMCA Award Winners 2023
INTERNATIONAL FILM MUSIC CRITICS ASSOCIATION ANNOUNCES WINNERS OF 2023 IFMCA AWARDS
JOHN WILLIAMS WINS SCORE OF THE YEAR FOR FIFTH INDIANA JONES FILM, DIAL OF DESTINY; CHRISTOPHER YOUNG WINS FOUR AWARDS FOR OUTSTANDING WORK IN HORROR FIELD; COMPOSERS FROM JAPAN AND POLAND ALSO TAKE HOME AWARDS
FEBRUARY 22, 2024 — The International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA) announces its list of winners for excellence in musical scoring in 2023, in the 2023 IFMCA Awards.
The award for Score of the Year goes to American composer John Williams, for his score for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the fifth film in the beloved action-adventure series starring Harrison Ford as the eponymous globetrotting archaeologist. The score also won the award for its genre, being named Best Score for an Action/Adventure film.
IFMCA member James Southall praised Dial of Destiny as “a nostalgic throwback to those great times of the past – a set of meticulously-composed new music by one of the greatest film composers we’ve ever had – an exhibition in skill and technique with the orchestra which is guaranteed to go beyond almost any other film music we hear this year.” IFMCA member Christian Clemmensen said that the score was “an especially gratifying treat and an immense pleasure to hear in the 2020’s… it continues to espouse the uniquely superior aspects of Williams’s writing from decades past”. Similarly, IFMCA member Anton Smit said the score was “a fantastic listening experience from start to finish… a masterpiece… one of the highlights of this final phase of John Williams’ career.”
This is John Williams’s fifth Score of the Year victory, having previously won for Memoirs of a Geisha in 2005, War Horse in 2011, Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. These wins also take Williams’s all-time IFMCA win tally to 21, not including those for archival releases of his older scores, making him the most-awarded composer in IFMCA history. Read more…
BAFTA Winners 2023
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) have announced the winners of the 77th British Academy Film Awards, honoring the best in film in 2023.
In the Best Original Music category, the winner was Ludwig Göransson, who won the award for his score for Oppenheimer, director Christopher Nolan’s epic drama about the life and work of the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer whose work on the Manhattan Project in the 1940s led to the creation of the world’s first nuclear weapon. Accepting his award, Göransson said:
“Thank you to the BAFTA, and thank you Chris [Nolan] and Emma [Thomas], for all the love and dedication your poured into Oppenheimer. Chris, also thank you so much for spending so much time with me working on this music. All the time you allowed for experimentation, listening to my music over and over again, dissecting the score, talking about the sounds, the themes, and making it into the musical world of Oppenheimer meant… it meant everything to me. That was an incredible experience. I want to also thank all the musicians that poured their hearts into playing on this score and making the music come alive. Without them it wouldn’t be possible. And I also want to thank my partner in life and music, Serena, I love you.”
The other nominees were Jerskin Fendrix for Poor Things, Daniel Pemberton for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Robbie Robertson for Killers of the Flower Moon, and Anthony Willis for Saltburn.
STORMSKERRY MAJA – Lauri Porra
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Stormskerry Maja is a new Finnish drama film directed by Tiina Lymi based on the acclaimed and famous ‘Stormskärs-Maja’ novels written by Anni Blomqvist in the 1960s and early 1970s. The film is set in the 19th century on the remote Åland Islands between Sweden and Finland and stars Amanda Jansson as the titular protagonist Maja. At the age of seventeen she is placed into an arranged marriage with a local fisherman, Janne, and immediately has to adapt to her new life as a fisherman’s wife, coping with her husband’s long absences at sea and taking care of her family alone. However, over time, Maja steadily grows into a strong-willed and independent woman who faces whatever life throws at her with strength and determination; the film follows the various hardships of her life, her triumphs and her tragedies, all against the atmospheric backdrop of this barren cluster of rocky islands in the Baltic Sea. Read more…
SHADOWLANDS – George Fenton
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Shadowlands is a British romantic drama film which looks at the profound personal and intellectual relationship between C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia fantasy books series, and the American poet Joy Gresham. The film is set in the 1950s and finds Lewis, a reserved, middle-aged bachelor teaching at Oxford University. He meets Gresham and her young son Douglas while she is on an academic tour of England; she is unhappily married, but does not reveal her troubles. What begins as a formal meeting of two minds slowly develops into a feeling of connection and love, and after Gresham divorces they marry – but their relationship will be tested when Joy is diagnosed with cancer. The film is directed by Richard Attenborough from a screenplay adapted from the stage work by William Nicholson, and stars Anthony Hopkins as Lewis and Debra Winger as Gresham. The film is one of those quiet, reserved, impeccably well-mannered British costume dramas, but it was nevertheless an enormous critical success, receiving Oscar nominations for Best Actress and Best Screenplay, and winning the BAFTA for Best British Film of 1993. Read more…
SCL Award Winners 2023
The Society of Composers and Lyricists (SCL) has announced the winners of the fifth annual SCL Awards, honoring the best in film and television music in 2023. The SCL is the premier professional trade group for composers, lyricists, and songwriters working in the motion picture, television, and game music industry, and is headquartered in Los Angeles. The winners are:
OUTSTANDING ORIGINAL SCORE FOR A STUDIO FILM
- LUDWIG GÖRANSSON for Oppenheimer
OUTSTANDING ORIGINAL SCORE FOR AN INDEPENDENT FILM
- JOHN POWELL for Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie
OUTSTANDING ORIGINAL SCORE FOR A TELEVISION OR STREAMING PRODUCTION
- NICHOLAS BRITELL for Succession
OUTSTANDING ORIGINAL TITLE SEQUENCE FOR A TELEVISION PRODUCTION
- CARLOS RAFAEL RIVERA for Lessons in Chemistry
OUTSTANDING ORIGINAL SONG FOR VISUAL MEDIA – DRAMA/DOCUMENTARY
- OLIVIA RODRIGO and DAN NIGRO for “Can’t Catch Me Now” from The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
OUTSTANDING ORIGINAL SONG FOR VISUAL MEDIA- MUSICAL/COMEDY
- BILLIE EILISH and FINNEAS O’CONNELL for “What Was I Made For?” from Barbie
OUTSTANDING ORIGINAL SCORE FOR INTERACTIVE MEDIA
- STEPHEN BARTON and GORDY HAAB for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
DAVID RAKSIN AWARD FOR EMERGING TALENT
- CATHERINE JOY
SPIRIT OF COLLABORATION AWARD
- MARTIN SCORSESE and ROBBIE ROBERTSON
ARGYLLE – Lorne Balfe
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Having already given the world a series of spy comedy/action-thrillers in the Kingsmen series, writer/director Matthew Vaughan is back with a new take on the genre with his latest film, Argylle. The film stars Bryce Dallas Howard as Elly Conway, the introverted author of a series of popular espionage novels featuring the protagonist Argylle. While on a train journey to visit her parents, Elly is saved from an ambush by an actual spy, Aidan Wylde (Sam Rockwell), who explains to her that a shadowy organization known as the Division is targeting her because her novels seemingly predict the future. The film co-stars Bryan Cranston, Catherine O’Hara, and Samuel L. Jackson, as well as Henry Cavill, John Cena, and Dua Lipa as the ‘film within a film’ protagonists of the Argylle stories, and it starts out as a fun, breezy, enjoyable action comedy – but as the film drags on, with plot twist after plot twist, double-cross after double-cross, some unexpectedly ropey special effects, and a large number of action set pieces which become increasingly ridiculous, it all falls apart. There is a really great film lurking within the mess that Argylle turned out to be, and it’s a shame because with this cast, and this director, it should have been so much better. Read more…
FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO – Miklós Rózsa
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Director Billy Wilder conceived of WWII film adapted from the 1917 play Hotel Imperial: Színmú Négy Felovonásban by Lajos Bíró. He sold the idea to Paramount Pictures, and secured the film rights. B. G. DeSylva was assigned production with a budget of $855,000, Wilder would direct, and he and Charles Brackett would write the screenplay. Casting was problematic as Wilder’s choice of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman failed to materialize. So, he cast Franchot Tone as Corporal John Bramble/Davos, Anne Baxter as Mouche, Akim Tamiroff as Farid, Erich von Stromheim as Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, Peter van Eyck as Lieutenant Schwegler, and Fortunio Bananova as General Sebastiano. Read more…
IFMCA Nominations 2023
INTERNATIONAL FILM MUSIC CRITICS ASSOCIATION AWARDS NOMINATIONS ANNOUNCED
JOHN WILLIAMS AND CHRISTOPHER YOUNG LEAD LIST OF NOMINATED COMPOSERS WITH FOUR NOMINATIONS EACH;MULTIPLE COMPOSERS FROM JAPAN AND POLAND AMONG MAJOR NOMINEES
FEBRUARY 8, 2024. The International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA) announces its list of nominees for excellence in musical scoring in 2023, for the 20th annual IFMCA Awards. Composers John Williams and Christopher Young lead the list of composer nominees with four nominations each, closely followed by Lorne Balfe, Stephen Barton, Ludwig Göransson, and Bear McCreary, who each have three.
Legendary American composer Williams’s nominations are all for his work on Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the fifth film in the beloved action-adventure series starring Harrison Ford as the eponymous globetrotting archaeologist. Dial of Destiny received nominations for Score of the Year, Best Action/Adventure score, and Composition of the Year for the score’s main theme, “Helena’s Theme,” while Williams himself was nominated for Composer of the Year.
IFMCA member James Southall praised Dial of Destiny as “a nostalgic throwback to those great times of the past – a set of meticulously-composed new music by one of the greatest film composers we’ve ever had – an exhibition in skill and technique with the orchestra which is guaranteed to go beyond almost any other film music we hear this year.” Similarly, IFMCA member Christian Clemmensen said that the score was “an especially gratifying treat and an immense pleasure to hear in the 2020’s. It extends the quality of the prior two [Indiana Jones] works and continues to espouse the uniquely superior aspects of Williams’s writing from decades past”. Read more…
THE MARK OF ZORRO – Alfred Newman
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Darryl F. Zanuck, vice-president of production at 20th Century Fox, decided to remake the popular 1920 silent film “The Mark of Zorro”, which starred Douglas Fairbanks. The story was first published in 1919 as a five-part magazine serialized novel called “The Curse of Capistrano” by Johnston McCulley, which after the film’s success was republished as a novel titled The Mark of Zorro. Zanuck would oversee production with a $1 million budget, Rouben Mamoulian was tasked with directing, and John Tainto Foote would write the screenplay. The studio’s star Tyrone Power would head the cast as Don Diego Vega AKA Zorro, joined by Linda Darnell as Lolita Quintero, Basil Rathbone as Captain Esteban Pasquale, Montagu Love as Don Alejandro Vega, J. Edward Bromberg as Don Luis Quintero, and Gale Sondergaard as Inez Quintero. Read more…
Movie Music UK Awards 2023
This year was a fascinating year for me in terms of film music, mainly because for the majority of it there wasn’t one runaway winner for Score of the Year. In recent years there has been a Rings of Power or some other clear front runner, but that wasn’t the case this year – instead there were a very large group of four and four-and-a-half star scores, any of which could have taken top honors depending on the slightest vagaries of personal taste, composer affection, or film quality. I heard more than 700 scores in 2023 – either as a soundtrack album, in movie context, or both – and I ended up rating 84 of them **** or better.
There were an especially large number of excellent scores from outside the mainstream Hollywood system – especially China, France, Japan, and Poland – which again indicates that the world of film music remains as rich and vibrant as it ever was, provided you are willing to put in some effort and explore beyond the confines of the mainstream Hollywood system. There were also a large number of exceptional TV scores, video game scores, and even scores for animated short films that left a significantly positive impression. As such, as was the case last year, I decided to continue to allow television and video game scores to compete on an equal footing with film scores for my coveted ‘Score of the Year’ award –
So, without further ado, here are my choices for the best scores of 2023! Read more…
BATMAN: MASK OF THE PHANTASM – Shirley Walker
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is an animated feature film released in 1993 and is part of the DC Animated Universe. Directed by Eric Radomski and Bruce Timm, the film serves as a spin-off of the critically acclaimed Batman: The Animated Series, and was released between seasons one and two of the show. The story revolves around Bruce Wayne, the billionaire playboy who doubles as the vigilante Batman. A mysterious figure known as the Phantasm begins targeting Gotham City’s crime bosses, leading to speculation that Batman is responsible. As Batman investigates, he discovers that the Phantasm has a personal connection to his past, which leads him to explore his early years and the choices that led him to become the Dark Knight. Mask of the Phantasm is notable for being the first full-length animated theatrical Batman film, and was celebrated at the time for its sophisticated narrative, atmospheric animation, nuanced portrayal of Batman, and exceptional voice acting from Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, and Dana Delany. It faced challenges at the box office at the time it was released, possibly due to its marketing and the misconception that it was solely a children’s movie, but in the intervening years it has gained a cult following and is now considered one of the standout Batman films. Read more…
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