breath

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 American landscape is full of all this beauty and wonder and also terrible history — it’s soaked in blood, literally,” says Dessner, who played many of the instruments heard in the score, largely recorded in an old studio in Portland, Ore. “The music inhabits a poetic space in the film.”

Stitching together the bombastic and the beautiful is Alexandre Desplat’s score for “Frankenstein.” This was his third film with Guillermo del Toro — he won an Oscar for “The Shape of Water” — and Desplat sees it as the “third movement of the triptych of this operatic story of creatures.”

Wanting to accentuate the ironic delicacy of the brawny colossus (Jacob Elordi), created from spare body parts and brought to life by a doctor (Oscar Isaac) driven mad by grief and trauma, Desplat wrote lots of music for solo violin, played with a pure tone by Norway’s Eldbjørg Hemsing.

“I wasn’t sure at the start if it would be right, but it became the voice of the creature,” the French composer says. “So this tiny, beautiful, fragile, extremely expensive instrument — when you pick up a violin, it weighs nothing, and yet it creates the most pure and beautiful sound. It doesn’t sound like, you know, the big boots of the creature walking, but something very haunting and deep and heartfelt. Because the creature needs to be loved by the audience, and we need to share the fragility of this creature and its need of love and being loved.”

It doesn’t get much more delicate than breath, which was one of the animating ideas for Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score for “Hedda.” The never-conventional Icelandic composer drew on the connection between breath and inspiration for this modern telling of the Henrik Ibsen play, about a bored housewife (Tessa Thompson) who spends an all-night party scheming and manipulating her guests.

Accompanying Hedda throughout is a choir of scooping notes, which by the film’s chaotic finale crescendo into a slightly horrific melee of wild vocals.

“I was not looking for people to be singing in any perfect way,” Guðnadóttir explains. “I was really just asking people to be who they were, and somehow out of the breath we started vocalizing and doing experiments with how everyone sang and where we sounded good together.”

Her choir was actually the film’s cast and crew, and they recorded on the part of the set where a giant chandelier plays an important role.

Other parts of the score feature jazz percussion and trumpets befitting 1950s England, where the story takes place. Guðnadóttir wrote a wistful, melancholic theme for Hedda that is often played by solo trumpet, and which she turned into an end credits song with lyrics by director Nia DaCosta. (Similarly, Dessner co-wrote a song for the “Train Dreams” credits with Nick Cave, who sang it.)

Still, what moviegoers sometimes crave most is an old-fashioned, crowd-pleasing anthem. That’s where Hans Zimmer and “F1” come hurtling in: His score for the summer race-car movie starring Brad Pitt is a pulsing electronica joy ride — a dance track for humans traveling at inhuman speed.

“It sort of let me go back and be a crazy boy and use a lot of synthesizers,” says Zimmer, who started his career as a synth programmer and who previously scored the racing movies “Days of Thunder” (1990) and “Rush” (2013).

“This is not a complicated score,” Zimmer says, “and at the same time, it is a complicated score because of the amount of notes I got rid of, the amount of complications I got rid of. I’m German; it’s easy for us to write incredibly pretentious, you know, with a lot of Sturm und Drang and meaning and all that stuff. It’s hard for us to say: We’re just going to go and give the audience a fun time.”