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Under-the-Radar Round Up 2025, Part 9
Original Reviews by Jonathan Broxton
I’m pleased to present the latest installment in my on-going series of articles looking at the best under-the-radar scores from around the world.
This article, the ninth and last of 2025, is a bumper crop, and covers another nine scores released last year from a wide array of genres and countries, including a short film from the Netherlands about magical paintings, a short film from Canada that makes the directorial debut of an Emmy-winning composer, a comedy-drama film from Denmark about a bank robber with dissociative identity disorder, a supernatural murder mystery from Vietnam about a 19th-century detective, and a short film from Mexico about a little girl and a heroic horsewoman who wields a magical lasso.
Then there’s an Australian sci-fi action horror film about a group of American soldiers encountering dinosaurs during the Vietnam war, an animated sex comedy from Norway about two sperms on an epic adventure trying to find their way to an un-fertilized egg, a Spanish TV series about a detective investigating a series of murders in a rural community, and an action horror film from Norway about a pair of gargantuan trolls terrorizing the fjords! Read more…
DRAGONKEEPER – Arturo Cardelús
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Dragonkeeper is a Spanish-Chinese-American animated fantasy adventure film directed by Salvador Simó and Li Jianping, adapted from the popular novel by Australian author Carole Wilkinson. The film is set in ancient China and follows Ping, a slave girl for the evil master Lan, who saves the life of an aging dragon named Danzi and escapes from Lan’s palace. Pursued by a ruthless dragon hunter named Diao, Ping and Danzi make an epic journey across China carrying a mysterious stone that must be protected as it is vital to the dragon’s legacy. The film’s English-language voice cast includes Bill Nighy, Bill Bailey, Anthony Howell, and young Mayalinee Griffiths as Ping. Read more…
Under-the-Radar Round Up 2019, Part II
As I have done for the past several years, I am pleased to present the second installment in my ongoing series of articles looking at the best “under the radar” scores from around the world. Rather than grouping the scores on a geographical basis, this year I decided to again simply present the scores in a random order, and so this second batch includes reviews of five more disparate scores from the first six months of the year – including a German apocalyptic drama, an Australian horror movie, a Spanish animated film about a surrealist filmmaker, a French drama about religion and pig farming, and a sweeping romance set in the German film industry in the 1960s! Read more…
Best Scores of 2015 – Europe
The third installment in my series of articles looking at the best “under the radar” scores from around the world concentrates on music from films from mainland Europe. I know this is a very ‘broad brush’ description, but there are a number of countries this year where there are just one or two standout works which couldn’t justify an entire article to themselves, so I decided to present you with this bumper crop from across the entire continent instead! The scope is quite wide-ranging, and includes everything from French documentaries to Polish serial killer thrillers, Russian adventure movies, and Greek romantic dramas, by written Oscar-winners and exciting newcomers alike. Read more…
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