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IFMCA Award Nominations 2025
INTERNATIONAL FILM MUSIC CRITICS ASSOCIATION (IFMCA) AWARDS NOMINATIONS ANNOUNCED
ALEXANDRE DESPLAT LEADS LIST OF NOMINATED COMPOSERS WITH SIX NOMINATIONS; FANTASY, SCIENCE FICTION, HORROR FILMS DOMINATE MAIN CATEGORIES
FEBRUARY 12, 2026. The International Film Music Critics Association (IFMCA) has announced its nominees for excellence in musical scoring in 2025 for the 22nd annual IFMCA Awards. Composer Alexandre Desplat leads this year’s field with six nominations, followed by Michael Giacchino with five and Simon Franglen with four.
The bulk of Desplat’s nominations come for his work on two scores: director Guillermo del Toro’s new exploration of the classic horror story Frankenstein, and the latest installment in the Jurassic Park series, Jurassic World: Rebirth. IFMCA member James Southall called Frankenstein “one of the year’s most elegant and rich film scores,” writing that “Desplat brings elegance and grace to the music, exploring feelings and relationships with precision and care,” and praising its lavish, multi-layered musical storytelling. Similarly, IFMCA member Florent Groult described Jurassic World: Rebirth as “a fine score” ranging “from the intimate to the spectacular and the horrific,” and “full of melodic features, shades, and orchestral details.” Read more…
FLYING TIGERS – Victor Young
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
By 1942 the United States was fully engaged in WWII and Republic Pictures management decided making a propaganda film to support the war effort would be both patriotic, and profitable. They decided to tell the tale of the American Volunteer Group (AVG), American civilian pilots who shipped out to China for the purpose of flying American P-40F fighter aircraft to aid Chinese allies fighting Japanese aggression. Edmund Grainger was placed in charge of production with a $900,000 budget, David Miller would direct, and Kenneth Gamet and Barry Trivers would write the screenplay. A fine cast was assembled, with John Wayne starring as Captain Jim Gordon, joined by John Carroll as “Woody” Jason, Anna Lee as Brooke Elliot, Paul Kelly as “Hap” Davis, Gordon Jones as “Alabama” Smith, Edmund MacDonsald as Blackie Bales and Mae Clarke as Verna Bales. Read more…
Movie Music UK Awards 2025
2025 was an excellent year for film music, if you were prepared to go and look for it. While very few of the year’s most acclaimed films had scores to match (I actively disliked a lot of the music from ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER and MARTY SUPREME and SIRÂT, especially as I heard it in context. I was not especially enamored of HAMNET or TRAIN DREAMS or WEAPONS, and the scores for THE SECRET AGENT and SENTIMENTAL VALUE barely even registered), exploring genre cinema, and especially cinema outside the American mainstream, revealed to me a significant amount of very high quality music that would never otherwise be acknowledged by the more well-known awards bodies.
I heard more than 750 scores in 2025 – either as a soundtrack album, in movie context, or both – and I ended up rating 75 of them **** or better, which is slightly down from 2024, but still a decent rate of return by anyone’s standards. Scores from France, the UK, Japan, and China all made my Top 20, and it was an especially outstanding year for Scandinavian film music, with five scores and one original song among my genre-specific winners and nominees.
Television music and video game music also continues to exceed expectations and, as I said last year, at this point scores written for those media can easily stand shoulder-to-shoulder with traditional film scores – and in my opinion they now often exceed them in terms of quality. Almost half of my nominees for score of the year come from those two worlds. Many of them feature the big, bold, thematic orchestral writing that drew me to the film music in the first place, and many of them show a significant amount of originality and creativity, which suggests to me that TV showrunners and game producers especially are fostering an environment where composers can push boundaries, be fearlessly creative, and combine genres and styles in a variety of exciting ways. Long may it continue.
One thing I want to mention is that, for the first time, I have decided to split my TV award between live-action projects and animated projects. There is so much astonishing TV music being written across the world these days, especially for anime in east Asia, that I felt it necessary to separate them out so I could properly highlight all the excellence that exists, and this seemed to me to be the most logical way to do it.
So, without further ado, here are my choices for the best scores of 2025! Read more…
WONDLA – Joy Ngiaw
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
WondLa is an animated science-fiction adventure TV series produced by Skydance Animation which aired on Apple TV+ for 20 episodes across three seasons between 2024 and 2025. It is an adaptation of the 2010 children’s novel The Search for WondLa (and its sequels) by Tony DiTerlizzi, and follows the adventures of Eva, a teenage human girl who grows up in a state-of-the-art bunker, assisted by ‘M.U.T.H.R,’ a robot caretaker. However, after an attack on the bunker by unknown assailants on her sixteenth birthday, Eva suddenly finds herself on the surface of a strange planet called Orbona, which is inhabited by aliens, and which appears to have no other humans. With the help of Otto, a friendly giant sentient tardigrade, and a cantankerous alien named Rovender Kitt, and guided by a faded picture containing the word ‘WondLa,’ Eva sets off across the planet to find others like her, and hopefully establish a new home. The show stars Jeanine Mason as the voice of Eva, and has a fun supporting voice cast that includes Teri Hatcher, Brad Garrett, Alan Tudyk, John Ratzenberger, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Simon Pegg, and Dwight Schultz, among others. Read more…
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER – Jonny Greenwood
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
One of the most popular and critically acclaimed movies of 2025, One Battle After Another is a black comedy action-thriller written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson, a former left-wing political revolutionary from an underground militant group called the French 75. Early in the film, the French 75 carry out a bold operation at the Mexico–US border, freeing apprehended immigrants and sparking conflict with ruthless military officer Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who has a bizarre sexual obsession with Bob’s partner Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). After Perfidia is arrested for murder, Lockjaw arranges for her to avoid prison in exchange for ratting out her comrades, forcing Bob to flee. Sixteen years later, Bob is living off-grid, paranoid, and raising his teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) far from the revolution. Things change for Bob when a still-obsessed Lockjaw discovers his location, and he and Willa are separated. Desperately trying to rescue his daughter, Bob is forced to get back in touch with his old French 75 compatriots – including Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), a martial arts instructor who also runs underground support networks – before Lockjaw finds her. Read more…
SILVER QUEEN – Victor Young
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
In 1942 Paramount Pictures decided to approve for production, a western by Forrest Halsey and William Allen Johnston, which offered a story about a woman gambler. To implement their vision the purchased a package deal from Warner Brothers, who loaned them actors Pricilla Land and George Brent, along with director Lloyd Bacon. Independent producer Harry Sherman was assigned production and writers Cecile Kramer and Bernard Schubert would write the screenplay. George Brent would star as James Kincaid with Priscilla Lane as Coralie Adams. Joining them would be Bruce Cabot as Gerald Forsythe and Lynn Overman as Hector Bailey. For reasons I could not discover, Paramount in the end did not distribute the film. Instead, United Artists is listed as the production company, which suggests the film was one of several sold to United Artists from 1942 – 1943. Read more…
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