Six of the Greatest Movie Soundtracks From This Century
· The Atlantic
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A great movie soundtrack can be just as memorable as the film itself. A few notes might bring an entire scene rushing back, and an old song can find new life in the right movie. Below, six Atlantic staffers share their favorite film soundtracks of the 21st century.
One Battle After Another (streaming on HBO Max and Prime Video)
Beneath its cat-and-mouse tale about fascism and rebellion, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2025 Best Picture Oscar winner is a masterpiece of cadence. The story progresses in slow creeps and sudden, skittering leaps. Characters crash together and pull apart like excited molecules. The sizzling energy owes to an unusual process: Anderson hired the Radiohead multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood to compose music before shooting began and then edited Greenwood’s work. The soundtrack pairs percussive piano with drums hooked to robotic circuits to create backbeats as insistent and unsteady as hiccups. Twanging guitars and symphonic strings express unsettled, ugly-pretty chords. The effect is an astonishingly original reminder that social movements are but collections of individuals, each squiggling along their own trajectory.
— Spencer Kornhaber, staff writer
***
Darkest Hour (streaming on Apple TV and Prime Video)
I love soundtracks, but my favorites—Glory, Miller’s Crossing, Crimson Tide—are all at least 30 years old. I am a sucker for a John Williams march or an elegiac Thomas Newman moment, but when I consulted my playlist, I found that one soundtrack kept rising to the top: Darkest Hour, by Dario Marianelli (with piano by Víkingur Ólafsson). The movie follows Winston Churchill’s first days in office, in 1940, after France fell and Britain stood alone against the Nazis. The score alternates between piano meditations and orchestral flight; like Churchill, it is fussy and elegant, quiet and then bombastic. It conveys the tension and urgency in the man and the moment. The final track, “We Shall Fight,” plays over Churchill’s speech to Parliament in which he vows to never surrender to evil. It is a moving and uplifting piece, but also tragic: He knew the horrors that awaited, and he led Britain to its fate anyway.
— Tom Nichols, staff writer
***
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (streaming on HBO Max)
On the subject of movie music, much comes to mind. My single favorite piece of original movie music this century might be “The Alien,” Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow’s eerie composition for Annihilation; my favorite repurposed song might be Plumtree’s “Scott Pilgrim,” the lovey-dovey indie-rock namesake of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Jon Brion’s off-kilter bricolage for Punch-Drunk Love, the torch ballads of A Star Is Born, the uncut Daft Punk–ness of Tron: Legacy—all of this matters to me. However, play two seconds of “Concerning Hobbits,” and I’m back in the Shire, awaiting the appearance of a great wizard and hanging out with my vertically challenged friends. Howard Shore’s score for Fellowship, and for the rest of the Lord of the Rings series, is both transportive and formfitting, making Peter Jackson’s movie sound as epic as it looks.
— Jeremy Gordon, senior editor
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Shrek 2 (streaming on Peacock)
When I first watched Shrek 2, I was far more interested in the movie’s ridiculous fairy-tale antics than in the music. Years later, I’ve come to appreciate that the soundtrack is every bit as good as the movie itself. The song choices, including Counting Crows’ “Accidentally in Love” in the opening sequence, are absurdly perfect for a film about a green ogre meeting his in-laws. The soundtrack also features David Bowie, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits, but the undisputed highlight is Jennifer Saunders’s rendition of “Holding Out for a Hero” as the Fairy Godmother, which turns the climactic rescue scene into a musical spectacle that has no right to be as thrilling as it is. A villain belting out a Bonnie Tyler song while a giant gingerbread man storms a castle? As a kid, I thought it was the height of cinema. I may have outgrown some of my other childhood favorites, but I still think the Fairy Godmother deserves a Grammy.
— Rafaela Jinich, assistant editor
***
Challengers (streaming on Paramount+ and Apple TV)
Ever need to outrun a serial killer, punch a bully, or fight a bear? Have I got the soundtrack for you! Nothing gets me going quite like Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s magnus opus, the soundtrack for Luca Guadagnino’s film Challengers. (To fans of their work for The Social Network—sorry, this one’s simply better!) The film makes the compelling argument that everything in life is about sex, except sex, which is about tennis. The pulsing, almost panic-inducing score draws on Berlin techno and ’90s rave music to heighten the anxiety of the film’s central love triangle. The frenzied sounds amplify the adrenaline that elite tennis players feel as they play (and sometimes kiss) each other. Listening to the climactic track, “Match Point,” one almost feels like the tennis ball being flung around the court. Whenever I need to crush a deadline or motivate myself to tackle a hard task, the Challengers soundtrack is my go-to. Plus, I once heard it played in a nightclub, and I haven’t been the same since.
— Madeleine Carlisle, staff writer
***
Sicario (streaming on HBO Max and Hulu)
The Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s work in Sicario has been ripped off a million times. The beautifully foreboding noises he pioneered and perfected for Denis Villeneuve’s ultra-stylish, very violent feds-versus-cartels thriller—the subterranean bass groans, the trapped-in-the-birth-canal percussion, the tinnitus-like swarms of strings—are now part of the standard kit of horror-movie soundtracking: You can hear them, in degraded form, everywhere. But Jóhannsson, unlike his imitators, had other registers, other capacities: Sicario also features the elegiac “Desert Music,” which sounds less like the industrial metal nihilists Godflesh and more like, I don’t know, Bach. Something else Jóhannsson shared with Bach? I think he was probably a genius.
— James Parker, staff writer
Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
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- The Brightness, a novel by Chad Harbach about two young women who navigate friendship, love, and ambition as they face life-changing decisions in their 20s (out Tuesday)
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Centuries before bookstores had shelves labeled romance and fictional hockey players locked eyes across the ice, the love story, with all of its attendant joys and sorrows, was an organizing principle of life—and of literature. The sentiment that another person might “complete” us enchanted both Plato and Jerry Maguire, and the search for that someone, along with the desire to understand why it can hurt so bad, has animated fiction from the beginning. The list below is an effort to name those love stories: novels, of course, but also poetry, plays, and short stories—that we consider to be the most enduring. We asked a jury of scholars, librarians, critics, and authors across genres, as well as many colleagues, to name their favorite titles that were originally written in English. We thought of our own personal touchstones, deliberated over the choices, and emerged with a group of standouts: 50 titles you won’t soon forget.
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