Mogwai's slow-shifting, meteoric post-rock might have never earnt them a place on the back-of-the-nets montage on Match Of The Day, but their soundtrack to Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait suggests that for this band, football boasts a deeper emotional palette than the Lightning Seeds could ever hope to evoke. Truthfully, it beggars belief it's taken Mogwai so long to reach the rarefied ...
Musicologists looking for evidence of Neil Young's connection with the avant-garde likes of Sonic Youth need look no further than this uncompromising soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch's film Dead Man--the first post-punk western to make any sense at all. The music here is scattered and fragmentary, and performed mainly on electric guitar. Though Young's instrumental musings work well in the film, ...
Mark Herman's tragi-comedy set among the fictional coal-mining community of Grimley revolves around the exploits of the local colliery's brass band and its struggle to survive imminent pit closure. Among the film's virtues are a bitter-sweet (with an emphasis on "bitter") script, strong performances all round--including Pete Postlethwaite, Tara Fitzgerald and Ewan McGregor--and a superb ...
The most eagerly anticipated movie of 1999, if not the decade, The Phantom Menace was also a mouth-watering prospect for soundtrack fans. Star Wars, after all, has become arguably the best-known and most influential movie score ever written, so a new instalment from John Williams, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, was always going to be a cause for celebration. And if the ...
Black Hawk Down is the fifth collaboration between composer Hans Zimmer and director Ridley Scott, and following Gladiator (2000) and Hannibal (2001), their third in fewer than two years. Though set two millennia after Gladiator, Black Hawk Down's unrelenting African warfare has much in common with the former blockbuster. Zimmer opens with comparable Arabic ...