(Sorry, Disney sorry, MGM sorry, Grease.). Once, and, yes, A Star Is Born), though in order to avoid making this list too unwieldy, I’m excluding straight-up musicals. I’m also allowing movies that feature diegetic musical performances (like Purple Rain. It’s hard to skip over Shaft or Superfly, even though they were created by single artists, exclusively for those projects. For this list, I leaned almost exclusively on the Scorpio Rising model: films scored from a variety of musical sources, many of them preexisting.

With A Star Is Born out this week, we decided it was time to determine the 40 best movie soundtracks of all time. The intersection of alluring images and catchy songs remains a reliable money-maker. A big part of the marketing has been focused on the music, with videos of performances by Cooper and his co-star Lady Gaga quickly going viral, well before the film’s release. Director/star Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born is the latest updating of a story that’s been a cinematic perennial since the 1930s and it’s already a hit at the box office. When Scorsese’s generation took over Hollywood at the end of the 1960s, they carried Anger in their hearts and minds.Ĭut to 2018, and if early projections hold, one of the year’s most popular albums is going to be a soundtrack.

A staple of art-house cinemas and university film programs, Scorpio Rising influenced the way that aspiring directors like Martin Scorsese would come to think about the juxtaposition of moving pictures and popular music. Back in 1963, the underground artist and puckish provocateur debuted his movie Scorpio Rising, a 30-minute barrage of erotic imagery and American iconography, scored to unlicensed rock and R&B songs by the likes of Elvis Presley and Ray Charles. This post has been updated to account for the release of A Star Is Born. Photo: Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Home Video, Gramercy Pictures and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

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