A Night at the Movies: The Film Scores That Make Us Feel Something

0:01 I'm Dustin Grinnell and welcome to another radio edition of Curiously. Not too long ago we had the Academy Awards. As a movie lover, I thought it would be cool to do a show to celebrate songs from movies. So today we're talking about all things movie themes. I've always loved the music and cinema. I'm highly attuned to the scores, how they enhance a moment or set a mood or atmosphere. So I collected some of my favorite movie scores. I tried to skip the ones everybody knows, your Jurassic Parks, your Forrest Gump's, and play pieces that deserve more airtime. What all of these songs have in common is simple. They make me feel something.

0:41 You're going to hear a lot of Hans Zimmer because the man is the GOAT behind some of the all time great scores from Gladiator to Inception, Pirates of the Caribbean to Interstellar. You also hear Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross more than once. I love their cool electronic textural scoring. Before each piece, I'll provide some commentary to give it a little context and color for anyone hoping to nail me on copyright violations. Please don't. I'm not selling anything. I'm just celebrating the music and the movies we love. So tell your lawyers to stand down and TuneIn with all that. Grab some popcorn, get comfortable and settle in for a night at the movies.

1:44 I have to start with something that has a Boston connection, so let's kick things off with Goodwill Hunting, a story of a troubled South Boston janitor at MIT who is secretly A mathematical genius and who finds his way to a therapist, played by Robin Williams, who helps him find himself. Danny Elfman scored the film in this quiet, understated main title. Sets the emotional tone perfectly. It's tender, a little melancholy and unassuming, and frankly iconic.

3:51 The. Such a good song.

4:58 Reminds me of the famous quote Do you like apples? I got her number. So how do you like them apples? Next song is from one of my favorite movies, her from 2013. It's this emotional story from the director and writer Spike Jones, and it's about a guy who is named Theodore, very lonely, and he falls in love with his AI operating system named Samantha. The score was composed by Arcade Fire and Owen Palette and is full of aching beauty, especially Song on the Beach, which feels both hopeful and melancholic, much like the film itself. But my favorite musical piece is the song Samantha creates, or Theodore, which she describes it as a kind of musical photograph, a way of capturing a feeling in sound. So here is that song titled Photograph. The.

8:17 Music. Really nice piece of music. If that's where AI is going for composing music, we're we're in trouble. So Next up is a movie that rightly found itself in the 2025 Best Picture conversation. It's called Train Dreams, and it's this kind of quietly stunning film. My favorite piece of music in the movie is called The Great Mystery, and it's this gorgeous, soaring piece that builds gradually and unfolds into something expansive and uplifting. So here it is. The.

10:39 The. Really great movie, beautiful love story, kind of a devastating plot twist but really shows the resilience of the human heart and just a credible love letter to nature and being out in the wild.

11:27 O the next song is our first piece from Hans Zimmer from Christopher Nolans epic film Interstellar. It's called Cornfield Chase and you'll probably recognize it. It's a solo piano piece with this awesome pipe organ swelling underneath. And it plays early in the movie while the main character, played by Matthew McConaughey, is driving through a cornfield while chasing a stray drone. But the song returns throughout the film, in it, and at the very end of the film, under this breathtaking voice over here it is. The.

13:50 The. Man Hans Zimmer don't miss. Just reminds me of the those final shots at the end of the movie when Matthew Hunt Conahay steals a ship and flies it out to go find Anne Hathaway, who is on a planet that ended up being habitable. She takes her helmet off, trusting that she could breathe the air.

14:36 Pretty awesome scene. Next up is actually an animated movie. It's a Pixar film called Soul, which is about a jazz musician who, on the day of his big break, falls down a manhole and ends up in the afterlife and then what's called the Great Before. It's a kind of cosmic waiting room where new souls acquire their personalities before being born. So this was scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and it has this kind of otherworldly sound. It's titled the Great Before Slash U Seminar. It's electronic, ethereal and awe inspiring. So here it is. The.

17:21 The. Yeah.

18:36 Well, that's a cool song. If that's playing when I'm ascending up to heaven in the afterlife, I I think I'm going to be OK with it. The next song is going to be pretty recognizable. It's probably one of the most moving pieces in this entire playlist. It's called On the Nature of Daylight and it's a classical composition by the British composer Mac Richter. It was originally written in 2004 as part of an anti war album and has since become one of the most widely licensed pieces of modern music. You've probably heard it in movies like Shutter Island. It was in the TV show The Last of Us, and most powerfully as the emotional spine of the 2016 movie Arrival. It was used recently in the film Hamnit as well. The reason it keeps appearing in so many films is simple. It is the perfect musical gut punch, inspiring and deeply emotional at the same time.

19:32 Above all, it's just incredibly beautiful. Here it is. The.

25:52 What a piece of music. I'm not crying, you're crying. Just think of Amy Adams character in the movie Arrival. Just playing with her child and seeing her child go through some things, some challenges that she didn't expect, or maybe she did actually expect it because, well, you have to watch the movie. But there's some, there's some time travel things going on there. And she makes quite a decision about her kid that frankly kind of blew me away. But that is a beautiful song. Apparently Max Richter, who composed it, he made it just for himself. He had no, you know, intention of letting it kind of outside of his own personal sphere and didn't think it would have any universal appeal and play that.

26:40 That turned out to be the exact opposite. It was also in The Handmaid's Tale, by the way, and I'm pretty sure he's going to be in more movies going forward. So the next movie, we're going to kind of bring it up a little bit is from the movie The Theory of Everything, and it's the story about Stephen Hawking, the physicist, the brilliant physicist who passed several years ago. It's about his brilliant mind, his illness with ALS and the kind of love story that was at the center of his life. The composer Johann Johanneson, he's from Iceland. He wrote the score and it it somehow feels kind of intellectual but also has this kind of bittersweet wonder that kind of captures Hawking's life and story.

27:27 And the title of the song is The Theory of Everything. Here it is. All right, moving on to a 2013 movie titled Tracks. It's actually a true story of a woman named Robin Davidson. And she was a young Australian woman who walked nearly 2000 miles across the Outback by herself with four camels and her dog.

28:57 The score was written by a guy that I love named Garth Stevenson. And he's a Canadian born musician and composer who grew up in the Rocky Mountains. And he has this remarkable gift for writing music that kind of sounds like the landscape. This film actually helped inspire me to take my own long solo journey. It was a motorcycle trip across the United States that it took about 10 years ago. And I reached out to Stevenson, who gave me permission to use this piece in my own video, which depicted that journey and was later picked up by Outside Magazine. Here it is.

30:57 Music. Music.

32:57 The. O That song goes on for about 3 more minutes, picks back U, but I think that's a good place to kind of stop it and move on to the next song. O we're going back to Hans Zimmer, and the movie this time is the 2003 movie starring Tom Cruise called The Last Samurai.

33:38 The movie set in Japan, and it follows A troubled American soldier who's captured during battle by the samurai. And he becomes immersed in their culture. He becomes a part of their village for a winter. They won't let him go and he has to kind of be their prisoner, but he also starts to assimilate. They start to forgive him and like him a little bit. He starts to loosen up, start to become more friendly, and he starts to like them and pick up some of their culture. The main theme from the movie is called A Way of Life, and it's often considered the kind of crown jewel of the score, and it's extraordinary, but it runs pretty long.

34:20 So today I just want to play another piece from that movie called Spectres in the Fog. It has this kind of haunting, ancient feeling of a meditative but battlefield period piece. So here it is. Music.

37:07 Music. All right, we are going to stay

38:47 with Hans Zimmer. Another one from him, same level of intensity to this movie is the 1995 movie Crimson Tide. It's the submarine thriller. Gene Hackman, Denzel Washington. They're locked in a standoff inside a submarine over a nuclear launch order. The music Roll Tide is pure Zimmer. It's like muscular, propulsive. It builds until it explodes. It's retty long so I'll fade out around the three minute mark, but if you haven't seen this movie, check it out. It's so good.

42:30 Oh man, I want to run through a wall after listening to that song. Anyways, let's kind of bring down the vibe a little bit. I think this is probably my favorite song in the list. It's just so moving, and it is played over an incredibly touching sequence. It's from the movie Up, 2009 Pixar film. It's about an old man who ties thousands of balloons to his house and floats away to South America to fulfill a promise he made to his late wife. But before any of that happens, the film opens with a beautiful but heartbreaking sequence.

43:17 It runs for about 4 minutes, entirely without dialogue. We watch a couple fall in love, build a life together, face heartbreak, grow old, and then one of them is gone. Michael Giancino scores that sequence with Married Life, a waltz that starts bright and hopeful and slowly, quietly breaks your heart. Here it is.

44:15 The. The.

45:24 The. The.

46:23 The. The.

47:09 Music. Music.

47:56 If you haven't seen up, you got to see that movie. If you want to just pull up the opening 4 minute sequence with that song on YouTube, you can find it there too. I just really am touched by that opening sequence. I'll never forget the moment where the husband and wife go to the hospital and I think they learn that they can't have a baby. It's not said explicitly, but then it cuts to the woman sitting outside in the lawn on a chair, letting the sun kind of just warm her face and her eyes are closed. And and that that, that moment always brings tears to my eyes. Such a heartbreaking way to open the movie in any type of storytelling.

48:44 It's always for a reason. If we had just opened the movie with an old guy, an elderly guy who's a curmudgeon, we would have not had any empathy or sympathy for him. But opening up with that sequence, we really understand where he is as a character. And then when he starts interacting with the with the boy, we kind of understand where he's coming from, where his, you know, unwillingness to open up is coming from. So beautiful movie, beautiful piece of music. All right, The next song comes from the 2023 movie Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan. When I first heard this next song, I I pretty much just couldn't stop listening to it for like a week.

49:30 It was composed by Ludwig Goransson, and it's got this kind of kinetic and cerebral vibe that just keeps building and building and adding layers of complexity. And I think it perfectly captures the mind of a young physicist. Oppenheimer, falling in love with the universe. Here it is.

50:34 The. Well, it doesn't get much more intense than that. So complex, so good.

51:45 The next song comes from the 2015 movie The Remnant. This is a survival epic sent in the 19th century. Leonardo DiCaprio plays this frontiersman, and he's on a fur trapping expedition in the American wilderness in the winter, so the score carries a kind of desolate, vast, icy stillness that perfectly mirrors the landscape. It's like this endless white silence stretching in every direction. But beneath the bleakness, there is a faint, persistent glimmer of hope in this song. If you've got a winter jacket nearby, now would be the time to throw it on. Here is the main theme from The Revenant. Music.

55:06 Music. Oh, man, so bleak, so icy. It just feels cold listening to that song. I love the pauses at the beginning. You know, they just really last longer than you'd think. And we've got that kind of like, wind sound effect behind it. I showed one of my friends from class, his name's Rocco. I showed Rocco this playlist in the second he saw the remnant main theme, he kind of like recoiled and said like he didn't want to hear that song. And it's because it's such like a movie about like suffering, suffering in the, you know, icy wilderness. And of course, the the bear attack scene. You know, I'm probably not going to go back and watch that movie. It was brutal, but good song, a song that really captured the landscape, which was its own character in the movie. All right, moving on.

56:10 Next up it this is like top three, one of my favorite pieces of music and any movie. The movie is Scent of a Woman from 1992 and it's just such a good movie. It's known for Al Pacino's legendary performance as a blind, cantankerous retired army Colonel who meets a young student going through a crisis. This next song main title is from Thomas Newman who has scored so many great films from The Shawshank Redemption to American Beauty. This title song runs throughout the film, but it's most memorable appearance comes at the very beginning, over a montage of prep school students pouring out of classrooms for Thanksgiving break. It's elegant, a bit mournful, and utterly cinematic. None.

1:00:01 Great movie. Fun fact, I sometimes used to when I was younger, pull up the final speech that Al Pacino gives at the end. It's just so generous. He comes to help his friend to get him out of a jam, and he does it. Whether it's such a moving speech, you're building a rap ship here, a vessel for seago and snitches. Such a good movie, such a good speech. And I think, don't quote me, but I think Al Pacino won in Oscar for that. If he didn't, he should have. Such a good movie. Absolutely one of my favorite movie scores. All right, let's move on. Next movie is a sports movie, a motivational sports movie. Easily top 10 motivational sports movie. It's Rudy.

1:00:50 It's the story of a kid with absolutely no business playing Notre Dame football. It's a true story. Who this guy? I fought his way onto the field with guts and determination alone. Every time I hear this song, I think about that undersized, underpowered young man with the heart of a lion. So here's tryouts. The.

1:02:18 The. The.

1:03:13 The. The.

1:04:40 The. The.

1:05:39 Classic. I just think about his final, Rudy's final game, that play where he makes a he makes a sack when he gets sort of one chance to play any and everybody freaks out and players run on the field and lift them up and the groundskeeper is clapping his hands. It doesn't get much better than that. You feel like you just want to jump out of the chair when you see that, you know, the the biggest underdog ever win the day. So we go Rudy. So the next movie is actually we're going to switch into a genre you might not expect for a show like this. And we're going into the horror genre.

1:06:20 Yes, a horror movie made it onto the playlist. So this movie was from 2018, and it's called Hereditary. It's a terrifying film. It was scored by the avant-garde composer Collin Stetson, and it's really unlike anything else on this list. I think it's kind of viscerally intense, but also darkly uplifting at the same time. The song plays during the film's final sequence, and it has absolutely no right being this overwhelming. And yet here we are. I give you Reborn.

1:08:40 The. None.

1:10:19 The. Man, that song is something else. You could play that song over a video watching grass grow and you'd be like, this is the most profound thing I've ever seen. Such a crazy song.

1:11:01 You think you're just listening to. You think you're just watching horror movie and all of a sudden this just incredibly intense song just takes over. Yeah. So let's move on. We've got 3 songs left. Let's go back to Boston. This movie is set in Cambridge. It's the 2010 movie The Social Network, and it was created by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Again, another piece from them, and it plays as Mark, the Mark Zuckerberg character leaves a bar in Cambridge and cuts across Harvard Yard on his way back to his dorm. This song kind of feels intellectual and quietly charged, and it captured something of Harvard's elite cerebral atmosphere, but also kind of a brooding intensity of a very complicated figure. So here is hand covers bruise.

1:12:42 The. The.

1:14:36 The. The.

1:15:58 So, yeah, great song, favorite line from that movie. When the Zuckerberg character says to the three guys he basically stole the idea from for Facebook, he says if you were the inventors of Facebook, you would have invented Facebook in line. When I was first introduced to that movie, The Social Network, I remember seeing the trailer in theaters and the song that plays over the trailer was just awesome too. It's actually the original song Creep from Radiohead and the choir group. Scala and the Kolenke Brothers did this cover of Creep during the original trailer. Go check it out if you get a chance. It's awesome.

1:16:41 All right, two songs left. The next song back to Hans Zimmer. He teams up with Benjamin Walfish on this next movie, Blade Runner 2049. It's a 2017 movie, and it's actually a sequel to Ridley Scott's original 1982 Blade Runner movie. It's this kind of strange, slow, lonely film, but quite beautiful. Ryan Gosling plays a character who's discovering who he really is. He's also hopelessly in love with an AI hologram played by Ana de Armas. And who wouldn't fall in love with a hologram of Ana de Armas? But that's neither here nor there. This piece, Mesa is just all atmosphere. It's vast, it's immersive, and it's quietly haunting. I'll fade it down around one minute 38 seconds before it goes super dark.

1:18:18 Music. The.

1:19:51 And there it is going super dark. Moral of the story, don't fall in love with AI systems. I don't know. Next song. Last song. It's the 2001 movie Moneyball with. Brad Pitt and it's a post rock piece by the band This Will Destroy You that became the Sonic backbone of the movie Moneyball. The movie is about the Oakland A's, a baseball team in the birth of statistical baseball. The song builds slowly, almost unbearably, and then it just opens up. It's called the Mighty Rio Grande, and I'm going to let it just play us out. So I want to say thanks for spending some time with me to listen to these movie themes and for tuning into the special episode of Curiously.

1:20:43 See you next time. The.

1:22:53 The.