score by Maurice Jarre With Lawrence of Arabia, both the film and its score are so iconic as to have transcended themselves and become synonymous with the Middle East in the Western cultural imagination. When we imagine the Arabian Peninsula, we...
score by Nino Rota There are a few scores which are completely inseparable from their source film, so iconic that to think of one is to immediately think of the other, the best of them operating as seamless sense memory....
score by Vangelis A pop star composer and a pop star director, both fresh from polar opposite victories (Chariots of Fire and Alien), achieved in Blade Runner a perfect marriage of tone, subtlety and style. Vangelis was the critical film...
score by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis On its own, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is an incredibly austere film, nearly as unadorned as its historical title suggests. However, as the first shot of an...
score by Jerry Goldsmith As a film, Chinatown seems to become more prescient every passing day, a genre period piece that said more about the future than the past, an examination of the foundations of urban consumption and survival, rooted...
Rene Clément’s 1952 classic Forbidden Games wastes no time in setting its terms as an uncompromising exploration of the complications of innocence in a time of war. Paulette (Bridget Fossey) accompanies her parents as they flee Paris before the Nazi...
An exploration of the horror of war and its unalterable deformation of the international psyche, Bill Morrison’s Beyond Zero: 1914-1918 is a forty minute montage of footage from the Great War, when the notion of a world war as reality...
As the Syrian uprising begins and world attention turns to what would eventually become the central conflict of the Arab Spring and the wider Middle East, a small blog, featured on a lesbian website, titled “A Gay Girl in Damascus”,...
The Outrageous Sophie Tucker is a fairly by-the-numbers, early-20th-century-celebrity/Hollywood documentary revolving around the extraordinary career and personage of a superstar now largely forgotten, Sophie Tucker. Born in the late 19th century as her family traveled from Russia to the United...
