4 Oscar-contending composers break down their films' scores

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It’s hard to discern a unifying theme in the best film scores of 2025.This year’s cinema certainly favored the bold and audaciously musical, in the literal sense — from the devilish fantasia of “Sinners,” composed by Ludwig Göransson, to the heavenly devotion of “The Testament of Ann Lee,” with score and songs by Daniel Blumberg.Jonny Greenwood returned, roaring, with his music for swarming strings and neurotic piano in “One Battle After Another.” Also swarming: Jerskin Fendrix’s bee-inspired soundtrack for “Bugonia.” Boldest yet, perhaps, was “Tron: Ares” — as a neon thrill ride that doubled as a music video for one of the most kick-ass, ’80s-coded Nine Inch Nails soundtracks.But gentle, impressionistic scores also cut through the blaring fog.

Among the standouts were Nala Sinephro’s music for “The Smashing Machine” — a jazzy watercolor painting that revealed the soft interior of a hulking mixed martial arts fighter — and Bryce Dessner’s dreamy landscape for “Train Dreams.” “The minimalism and the restraint of the film is reflected in the musical palette,” explains Dessner, working with the director-writer duo Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar for the fourth time.Their most recent collaboration was “Sing Sing” — they’re drawn to stories about men with tender hearts — and the pair so trusted Dessner, an American composer who is also a member of the band the National, that he was able to start writing before they even completed the film.The score is a tone poem for cascading piano, string quartet and sighing clarinet lines.

Dessner says he thought of himself as a landscape painter, conveying not only the American West in the early 1900s and the passing of time but also the inner landscape of taciturn, sensitive lumberjack Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) and his relationship with his wife, Gladys (Felicity Jones).“The Am...