Inchon Soundtrack

The soundtrack to the 2018 Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody offers a fittingly cinematic portrait of the iconic rock band, built around a handful of the group's most well-known songs, including live versions and several tracks reworked specifically for the film. As a souvenir of the movie, the soundtrack works especially well. Opening with guitarist Brian May's arrangement of the "20th Century Fox Fanfare," and showcasing his distinctive searing guitar leads, it perfectly sets the tone for telling Queen and Freddie Mercury's story on the big screen. Here we get such beloved classics as "Somebody to Love," "Killer Queen," "Another One Bites the Dust," and "Under Pressure."

The soundtrack for first-time director Jason Reitman's satire of Big Tobacco spin plays like an amiable, city slicker sequel to O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Tex Williams' western swing standard "Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette!" kicks things off with a mischievous grin, laying the groundwork for classics from Patsy Cline ("Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray"), Otis Redding ("Cigarettes and Coffee"), the Mills Brothers ("Smoke Rings"), and the Platters ("Smoke Gets in Your Eyes"). The thread is obvious, but the selections sound handpicked rather than researched solely on the basis of their subject matter. Composer Rolfe Kent, who brought such an excellent sense of place to 2004's Sideways, manages to echo the hipster swing of the Mancini-era '60s without sounding regressive, providing Thank You for Smoking with a cheerful brevity that keeps the spin more balanced than fair.

When the new Halloween movie hits theaters in October 2018, it will have the distinction of being the first film in the series with creator John Carpenter’s direct involvement since 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Carpenter serves on the new David Gordon Green-directed installment as an executive producer, a creative consultant, and, thrillingly, as a soundtrack composer, alongside his collaborators from his three recent solo albums, Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies.

For fans of Jerry Goldsmith's score for Ridley Scott 1978 movie Alien, this two-disc Intrada set is the ultimate fantasy. Everything is here and then some. Disc 1 contains Goldsmith's entire score as he originally intended it with every cue in place, including those that were later cut from the film plus his recomposed versions of cues the director made him change (Goldsmith's original main theme, for example, appears without its signature heroic trumpet melody because the director thought it wasn't creepy enough). Disc 2 includes the original soundtrack as issued on LP plus six other bonus tracks of demonstration takes and even the brief except from Eine kleine Nachtmusik used in the film. The stereo sound here is fabulous, the performances definitive, and the liner notes exhaustive. And the score, like the film, is a classic of its genre. With its mixture of the ecstatic chromaticism of Scriabin, the skittering strings of Penderecki, the harmonic waves of Ligeti, and the atmospheric percussion of Herrmann, Goldsmith's score became a template for all subsequent science fiction/horror movies. But as this splendid release so amply shows, the original still can't be beat.