Released during the era of leisure suits and pet rocks, the film Superman: The Movie has aged about as well. But the often clumsy charms of Richard Donner's cartoonish, hit-and-miss take on the Man of Steel was blessed with at least one superlative artistic effort: John Williams's epic score. The composer's Oscar-nominated music (coming on the heels of Star Wars and Close ...
While director Steven Spielberg has sometimes termed his blockbuster hit E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial a loose sequel to his similarly themed Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that notion only underscores the breadth of John Williams' talents as a composer and tempts the listener to consider this score a sort of second, more nakedly emotional movement to his Close Encounters ...
Peter Benchley's bestselling novel about the sobering impact of shark attacks on a New England beach town's tourist season gave director Steven Spielberg the perfect opportunity to craft a suspenseful action-drama. An immediate blockbuster upon release in 1975, the movie is being hailed as a classic 25 years later by being released on DVD. The 20 minutes of additional score and interviews with ...
Putting the (quite glorious) excess of The Phantom Menace behind him, for Alan Parker's Angela's Ashes John Williams has created an epic pastoral romance that's more in the tradition of his scores for Born On The Fourth Of July and Seven Years In Tibet. The music has prominent solo roles for oboe, violin, cello and piano, while massed strings carry the burden of the ...