2025 is not a year that will be missed in many respects, but one of the few in which it might is when it comes to movie and television scores. There have been a lot of good ones this year, and of all different shapes and sizes. On one end of the spectrum, Michael Giacchino created what is inarguably the most memorable, fun theme that a Marvel movie has ever had in “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.” On the other end, Bryce Dessner somehow gets folk instruments to capture the eternal magic of trees in “Train Dreams.” This is to say nothing of the runaway success of “KPop Demon Hunters,” where the songs are, of course, the stars, but they are being supported by a Honmoon-like lattice of score composed by Marcelo Zarvos.

On the TV side, too, where even more music is often asked to do even more thankless tasks, there has been some great music. We had many seasoned stalwarts; Daniel Pemberton’s score for “Slow Horses” proves, with the music of Season 5, that just like Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), it is a messy master of the thriller trade. The music of “The Gilded Age” Season 3, composed by the Gregson-Williams brothers, continues to be delightfully gilded. But also, as proved true when we asked composers themselves for some of their favorite scores, some great TV music has come from wholly original sounds, like Frederico Justid’s score for “The Eternaut” and Ariel Marx’s incredible work on “Dying for Sex.”

There is honestly not much that sets the scores on our list apart from a field of worthy honorable mentions. Some of it is logistical, it must be said. We forced ourselves to pick only five top TV scores, and we were a little more expansive on the film side. But all the selections on our list, film or TV, are scores that do more than just create unforgettable melodies or articulate something emotionally that words and visuals can’t. They all have the ability to operate multiple gears — perhaps operate at multiple registers would be the more apt metaphor — simultaneously.

The best film and TV scores this year give us vivid senses of place and character, work subtly on the audience as much as they anchor dramatic moments, and find inventive ways to make their films feel real — in that wordless, emotional way the best music does.

With contributions from David Ehrlich, Jim Hemphill, and Chris O’Falt.

Films are listed alphabetically by title; then TV shows are listed alphabetically by title.

“Avatar: Fire and Ash”

Image Credit: ©20th Century Studios/Courtesy Everett Collection

An epic film deserves an epic score, and composer Simon Franglen more than delivers with over three hours of wildly varied, technically innovative, and emotionally affecting themes. Like director James Cameron, Franglen refuses to repeat himself by merely recycling his excellent work on “Avatar: Way of Water”; instead, he expands his sonic palette exponentially, creating new Mongolian-inflected sounds for the Ash clan and scoring the Windtraders clan with custom instruments designed specifically for this film.

Franglen began writing cues for the film seven years ago, and his score has the complexity and perfection of something that has been worked over with rigor and discipline — but the emotional power that comes with unyielding passion. (Bonus points for co-writing the film’s banger of an end credits song!) —JH

“Frankenstein”

Image Credit: ©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection

I still haven’t decided where “Frankenstein” ranks among Alexandre Desplat’s best film scores, but it’s definitely his best film score in years. Strings and pianos tilt, strange and lilting like some chamber music from the Unseelie Court, and do as much to power our sense of Victor’s manic quest to create life as Oscar Isaac does. As with every aspect of the Guillermo del Toro film’s design, there is an unapologetic lushness and a baroque, broken fairytale quality to the music of “Frankenstein” that is, honestly, required to make the original sci-fi story feel as big as its ideas were when Mary Shelley first wrote them.

There is some fantastic solo violin work that adds another dimension, especially to the Creature’s (Jacob Elordi) battered heart, and the interplay between those solos and the fuller orchestra emphasizes both protagonists’ loneliness in a way that nothing else does. Desplat’s score — at the risk of a very bad “Frankenstein” pun — galvanizes the story and pulls us, irresistibly, into its world. —SS

“Hamnet”

Image Credit: ©Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection

Max Richter is really good at writing music that breaks your heart, and frankly, nothing less would do for “Hamnet.” The composer connected with the themes in writer and director Chloe Zhao’s script — the story of Agnes Shakespeare (Jessie Buckley) and William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) falling in love, becoming parents, grieving, and, in short, living. There are so many ways to realize these themes through music, but really, there was only one.

Richter composed thinking deeply about the kind of connection to nature and the quality of female voices and breath that represent Agnes. He also sampled Elizabethan-era instruments and recontextualized them to create an awestruck, indistinct sense of the unseen world in which young Hamnet (Jaocbi Jupe) finds himself. This mingled sense of the natural and the supernatural, which Richter is able to evoke from his all-female choir and the warmth of his strings, makes the film feel true. There’s really no other way to say it. The “Hamnet” score flows and ebbs with the constancy of an emotional tide, and draws the characters closer to each other, and us that much closer to them. *—SS *

“Jay Kelly”

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Nicholas Britell and Noah Bombach talked about the idea of a “happy-sad” score for aging and unsure movie star Jay Kelly (George Clooney) and for their film Jay Kelly. Britell’s elegant yet antsy felt piano — which has a more muted, mechanical sound than a baby grand and fits Jay for reasons that quickly become obvious) — powers far more than a main character theme that is hopeful and glamorous when played at speed and very sad when you slow it down. Britell captures some of the magic of movies. At least since 1988, it has been a daunting task to create a theme for cinema in Italy, but the “Jay Kelly” score captures the yearning romance of the silver screen in a way that is instantly relatable and yet wholly its own thing.

Britell’s work also puts pressure on the film’s protagonist, making him smaller or prompting moments of crashout, similar to the way that music can emotionally sabotage the Roy family on “Succession” but also wholly its own thing here. Britell’s music is also, quite simply, delightful. You don’t get to go again at life, but fortunately, you can put the Jay Kelly theme on repeat. *—SS *

“Marty Supreme”

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One of the first and most rewarding choices that sets “Marty Supreme” on its path to greatness was Josh Safdie’s decision to exclusively soundtrack his 1950s ping-pong epic with ’80s bangers from the likes of New Order, Tears for Fears, and Peter Gabriel. That confronted “Uncut Gems” composer Daniel Lopatin — who records his own music as Oneohtrix Point Never — with the challenge, and the opportunity, of writing a score to match. One that would mesh with the movie’s post-war setting while also reflecting its protagonist’s desperate race towards a dream future that he pursues like a destiny.

The result is a lush, frantic, and brilliantly expansive suite of music that makes it feel as if young Marty Mauser is in tine with a tomorrow only he can hear. The score is so intricate and voluble that it functions like a second screenplay, as Lopatin nods at everyone from Ennio Morricone to Tangerine Dream as swirls of jazz saxophone and waves of tetchy synths hurl Marty towards the horizon by tapping into an anxiety that period-appropriate music could never hope to match. —DE

“Nuremberg”

Image Credit: ©Sony Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

How does one find a musical language to describe the horror of the Holocaust? On top of that, how does one also use that language to celebrate the hope and resiliency of survivors? It’s a daunting task, but one which composer Brian Tyler rises to brilliantly with his haunting and lyrical score. The music here is both epic and intimate, capturing a historical moment while also finding ways to convey complex psychology and interpersonal conflicts; Tyler’s scoring of the scenes involving Russell Crowe’s Hermann Göring are particularly brilliant in the way that they express both how Göring sees himself (as heroic and self-sacrificing) and how we are meant to see him (as a monstrous personification of pure evil).

The score’s power comes largely from Tyler’s thorough approach to historical research; in Göring’s final scene, for example, Tyler uses a tone that had been played at the camps to subtly condemn the Nazi official through the music. It’s a stunning aural moment in a film that is filled with them. —JH

“One Battle After Another”

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Jonny Greenwood has now scored five of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies (six, if you count the 2015 documentary “Junun”), but none of them have ever asked more from — or used more of — his music than this year’s “One Battle After Another,” a Pynchonian action-comedy that skitters between slapstick delirium and grim reality at the speed of a “Hail to the Thief”-era Radiohead song. From the portentous crash of violins that opens the film to the sawing violins that accompany its climactic car chase and the jittery piano melodies that connect the dots between them, Greenwood’s all but constant score perfectly captures the overlapping energies of PTA’s quasi-revolutionary opus so that all of the film’s various battles ultimately sound as if they’re in service to the same ongoing fight.

“One Battle After Another” might seem to be among the lighter films that Anderson has made thus far, but Greenwood’s virtuosic score makes it impossible to mistake the sincerity of its horrors, or the serious fun that it takes in disrupting them. Tom Petty might have the last laugh, but it’s Jonny Greenwood who does the almost impossible job of setting him up for the perfect final needle drop. —DE

“The Smashing Machine”

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Nala Sinephro is an experimental jazz musician, and Benny Safdie’s “The Smashing Machine” is her first film score. You would maybe know the first thing from watching the movie, but you’d have no idea of the second. The music in “The Smashing Machine” is assured but mercurial, powered by synths but very deeply felt and emotional, rising and falling in tidal swells. Musically, the combination of synths, harp, flute, and sax feels like the perfect sidestep to a traditionally rousing sports movie score, in the same way that MMA of Mark Kerr’s (Dwayne Johnson) era stood outside the neat circle of American sports.

Some of the most interesting work in any film score all year happens in the moments where Sinephro embraces the chaos and messiness of Kerr’s life, his struggles with addiction, and his relationship with his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt). There’s a sense that’s jazz but also very much something more in the ways Sinephro toggles with the score, having a sense of control or being furiously, desperately inventive. Here’s hoping “The Smashing Machine” is only the first of many times that Sinephro’s music takes us on a journey that we feel like we discover, as opposed to telling us how to feel. —SS

“Sirât”

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Right from its opening sequence, writer/director Oliver Laxe grounds us in the film’s musical setting of a three-day rave in the Southern Moroccan Desert, which was inspired by Laxe’s time with Europe’s Free Party Movement. The music of Berlin-based techno producer David Letellier, aka DJ Kangding Ray, is inseparable from this underground rave scene, but after that diegetic opening, his driving techno beat, and the significant adaptation of his own music (along with new tracks for the film) morphs into a score-meets-soundscape that is the backbone of Laxe’s metaphysical journey across the expansive landscape.

The trance-like music gives way to the transcendental, as Laxe’s exploration of the heaven-and-hell of life in 2025, and the beauty and wisdom of the nomadic souls of those chasing the music (literally, as they are headed to another rave, and figuratively) across the desert. Electronic music has never been so orchestra-like, as it lifts “Sirāt” to the spiritual, but also disintegrates as the audience and characters are plunged into impossible-to-predict depths. —CO

“Sinners”

Image Credit: ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

One of cinema’s greatest composers creates his greatest work to date with this rousing, terrifying, powerful blend of Delta blues and old-school symphonic horror scoring. Reuniting with frequent collaborator Ryan Coogler, Ludwig Göransson takes one bold swing after another, and every single one pays off — from his live recording on set of much of the music (facilitated by an unusually close collaboration with production sound mixer Chris Welcker) and aggressive suspense scoring to the exhilarating mash-up of musical styles traversing centuries that serves as the movie’s most memorable set piece. Coogler’s most personal film to date is also his most tonally varied, switching genres and moods across an incredibly wide emotional spectrum, and Göransson’s music is the secret weapon that unifies it all. —JH

“The Testament of Ann Lee”

Image Credit: ©Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

It’s not an understatement to say that without Daniel Blumberg’s music, “The Testament of Ann Lee” would not exist. So much of the film telling the story of Ann Lee’s (Amanda Seyfried) spiritual awakening and leadership of the Shaker movement is done through the same dizzying, ecstatic movement that defines Shaker worship. Blumberg’s music embodies that, with real emphasis on the body.

This is simultaneously a breathy and a percussive score, hypnotically repetitive and yet piercingly evocative, kind of in the way that prayers or psalms are. The music is integral to the structure of the Mona Fastvold film, each original number going through a musical cycle of momentum, pathos, and grace, but in its own way. To adapt the language of Ann Lee herself, the music is what finds a place for every emotion in “The Testament of Ann Lee,” and what puts every emotion in its place. —SS

“Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery”

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Even beyond the music of “Wake Up Dead Man” itself, it’s really fun when a composer gets to go in a specific musical direction so hard they burst through a brick wall like the Kool-Aid Man. Composer Nathan Johnson does just that, going deep and dark with a gothic sound for the latest Rian Johnson mystery. There are a lot of the same string elements that so gleefully amped up the drama of the first “Knives Out,” but here Johnson plays with rhythm and metric modulation to create a musical sense of falseness, slipperiness, underneath the sound.

The score is constantly catching when things are just not adding up, or people are being hypocritical, even if young Father Jud (Josh O’Connor) is too kind to call them out on it. There is a sense of conflict in the structure of the score that Johnson banks and slowly grows like a fire (maybe Hellfire), then gets to resolve in a way that is as satisfying as a big Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) explanation of the whodunit. Johnson’s music walks the line beautifully between moments of melodic beauty and an undercurrent of unsettling vibes. *—SS *

“Andor”

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The beauty of the world in the first season of “Andor” is that Nicholas Britell attacked the monumental challenge of doing, you know, A Star Wars™ by not trying to echo John Williams but coming at a more percussive, synth-y, spycrafty score that slowly builds towards and then earns more orchestral ideas of romance and adventure in our favorite galaxy far, far away.

In Season 2, composer Brandon Roberts ably picks up the baton from Britell and expands the musical scope of the show even further, but “Andor” Season 2 is such a great TV score because Roberts also adds to its musical texture and specificity. Just as production designer Luke Hull built Palmo Square up from the ground to represent the proud planet Ghorman, Roberts builds full musical identities for places Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and his friends go in order to spread the flame of rebellion, ones that feel wholly organic and speak to the empty refinement of Chandrila or the scrappy, fragile peace on Mina-Rau.

Roberts’ work is an essential component in the series’ ability to transition between planets and across time, and still make us feel like every story is connected and every sacrifice means something. The ending of “Andor” simply would not work without Roberts’ “Past/Present/Future” cue. It is the music that completes the story and brings all our characters, wherever they are in the Galaxy, into the shadow of the Death Star. —SS

“Industry”

Image Credit: Simon Ridgway

When Nathan Micay was brought onto Season 1, he was fairly new to film and TV scores, but the Berlin-based (via Canada) DJ and electronic music producer’s expansive and atmospheric sound was the perfect musical accompaniment for a story of young traders breaking into the cutthroat world of London finance. In stories about characters struggling, often unsuccessfully, to hold onto their humanity in a world where every relationship is transactional, Micay’s synth and strings score became the expression of the emotion they must coldly bury.

In the same way, Tangerine Dream’s “Risky Business” score (a direct influence), the “Industry” music not only captures their heartbreak, but their youthful, wide-eyed excitement of being exposed to the decadent, behind-closed-doors world of the rich and powerful. In Season 3, not only did the young leads mature with a few years under their belt, but so did co-creators Konrad Kay and Mickey Down’s writing, as core characters’ storylines were more fully fleshed out and structured to pay off in ways that were more layered, gripping, and devastating. Listening to Micay mirror this with the development of his already established themes, including adding percussion for the first time, makes that ever-so recognizable “Industry” sound become that much more effective. —CO

“Pluribus”

Image Credit: ©Apple TV/Courtesy Everett Collection

It would be disrespectful to say, “Dave Porter, I was unfamiliar with your game,” because Porter is a fantastic composer who has ably scored many other TV shows beyond “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” But his previous collaborations with showrunner Vince Gilligan have really used music as part of establishing the dust and dry air — and just a little bit of the enchantment — in those series’ New Mexico setting. The music isn’t being asked to carry as heavy a worldbuilding and emotional load as the score in something like, say, a “House of the Dragon.” This is not the case in “Pluribus,” where Porter is let loose to be more unsettling, more strangely beautiful, and much, much weirder. Wow, does he deliver.

The score of “Pluribus” is not just doing lifting. It is making gains in terms of emotionally exploring the plight of Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn). Porter’s music plays with spritely but unsettling choral elements, gleefully bombastic horns, trickster drums, and hypnotic strings so that the score always kind of sounds like one thing (a hivemind collective of most of humanity), but can be deployed to be bleakly funny, tense and thrilling, or bewildering and heartbreaking, as is needed. It’s one of the most flexible TV scores in recent memory, and one of the most powerful, too. —SS

“Severance”

Image Credit: ©Apple TV/Courtesy Everett Collection

Theodore Shapiro’s work on the first season of “Severance” was outstanding, bringing us into the cold, off-kilter, but alluring world of Lumon with just a few notes skittering across the piano. It almost feels like cheating to put it on our score list again, because Shapiro wisely does not attempt to break what’s already working so well. But he does get to play with different colors of his already established musical palette. In so doing, Shapiro weaponizes the main themes against us even more than he already did throughout the first season, often opting for slower, more warped spins on the sounds of Lumon to amp up the dread that we feel, even just staring at goats.

Which isn’t to say that music on “Severance” isn’t propulsive when that’s called for — see: the marching band — but Shapiro’s “Season 2 score often takes the unexpected musical path to its emotional goals, which makes the strangeness of the show’s setting feel viscerally, intuitively real to us. —SS

“The Studio”

Image Credit: ©Apple TV/Courtesy Everett Collection

Playful and percussive, composer Antonio Sanchez perfectly captures the daily stress of studio chief Matt Remick (Seth Rogen). We’ve heard drums be used to create the clock ticking, internal frenzy of a character trying to hold it together before, but like with his “Birdman” score (which Rogen and co-creator Evan Goldberg initially used as temp), Sanchez has the unique ability to sustain it for entire (often long) scenes, which, when married with Rogen and Goldberg’s use of oners (and only oners), the audience is never released from the mounting stress of the character’s perdicament.

The jazz-influenced music, in which Sanchez played all the instruments, brings an improvisational flair to the Continental Studio team reacting on their feet, as things go from bad to worse in unexpected ways. Sanchez finds different instrument combinations –horns, strings, or keyboards being paired with the underlying drums– to expand the palette, giving characters their own color, while making sure the audience, regardless of the mounting anxiety, never forgets we are in satirical comedy. —CO