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Hmmm...many IMAGES threads, so I wasn't sure which to ressurect, but I'll try this one.
I was recently asked by the Norwegian Art Institute and the organization NyMusikk (New Music) to select a film with striking music and introduce it as part of their Film Club series. So after some thought -- and considering the venue -- I decided to go for Altman and Williams' IMAGES. Hopefully, it will introduce the film and score to more people and show them that Williams is so much more than just neoromantic fanfares and stuff! Here's the event info:
http://nymusikk.no/en/hva-skjer/filmklubb-images
I know it's too far away for 99% of you, but I just wanted to share this little "John Williams missionary activity" here.

For an hour and twenty minutes, before an audience of 200, the composer answered questions from Robert Townson and the public. The conference featured five video clips from the following films: A Beautiful Mind (Creating "Governing Dynamics"), Braveheart (A Gift of a Thistle), Legends of the Fall (The Ludlows), Avatar (Jake's First Flight), and finally Titanic (Rose).
James Horner's emotion during each sequence, the precision of his answers and the proximity of the composer made this conference a special and unique moment.
We are pleased to provide you our impressions, accompanied by three video excerpts.

http://jameshorner-filmmusic.com/hollywood-vienna-2013-international-film-music-symposium/

Which Britten plagiarized in WAR REQUIEM (listen at 10:01, thanks to crocodile for unmasking the charade ):

LEGEND (1985) Director's cut
I think this would be great for a Halloween family viewing (goblins, fairies, elves, monsters, witches etc..)
Whatever is the negativity towards the script/story etc., one cannot deny that this is a gorgeous looking film with an excelletnt atmosphere and some goosebump moments!
The Jerry Goldsmith score is a masterpiece (his best for me - although not used in the film in its entirety).
I viewed aferwards some scenes with the Tangerine Dream score from the American theatrical version. Inappropriate, out of place, out of context, out of everything. I can't understand what they were thinking.
Half of the film's sublime magical atmosphere is due to the Goldsmith score.
I think I should buy the European Bluray too, because that is the version I first saw and loved.

So was Marc Webb!

Karol

To all the fucking cavemen, here's why you should own COCOON
The Williams-like money shot:

The more impressionistic yearning stuff:

Don't forget earlier scores...most of them are reeeaaaally good. I. e.

THE FLY II

Sweet, a bunch of new 2013 film scores are available on Spotify now since I last checked - Prisoners, Thanks For Sharing, Don Jon, Gravity, Captain Philips, Romeo and Juliet, Carrie, Escape Plan, Ender's Game, and The Counselor. I got some listening to do!

When the Whales Came by Christopher Gunning: Another simply gorgeous piece of music from Mr. Gunning, a mix of British folk music and mesmerizingly enchanting music for orchestra and solo soprano. The main theme conveys spacious magic of the ocean depths in its wondrous tone and the solo soprano forms a link to the singing of the whales so integral to the story of the film. The secondary theme for the islanders is a simple yet effective English folksy pastoral melody with decency and goodness written all over it. The music follows a theme and variation idea throughout with the main theme receiving a good workout in different orchestral guises, none so majestic and haunting as the finale of the album. Gunning even uses cleverly actual whale song on a couple of tracks to a good effect. Yet another winning score from this British maestro, whose magnificent film work is criminally under-represented on disc these days.

Oh The Golden Compass definitely exceeds his Potter music. What separates those and Rise of the Guardians from this score is that here you can clearly hear his voice, It's a much grander take on his waltzy-drama style with a treasury of thematic material (around ten or so).
Karol

I somehow cannot listen to this stuff. It's either too bouncy or too much like Mancini muzak (though the pomp and circumstance-swagger of the Fitzwilly cue GIMBELS ROBBERY is cute).
Now on to Henry Mancini's 99 & 44/100% Dead
Most of it is inconsequential pop source, but the Main Title rocks BIG TIME! (in a Schifrin DIRTY HARRY kind of way)

Secret of the Sahara by Ennio Morricone
Karol

But not serial music.

Cocoon and The Hunt for Red October are are both coming out on October 28th. Woo-hoo!


Oh dear, my poor wallet...
Karol

I also really enjoyed Shaiman's score too. It's very Elfman-esque, but it has Shaiman's marks all over it. The music playing over Gomez and Morticia's dance at the restaurant is superb.

Thor, i know more than a few outside-Hollywood movies and i know that even if from this day on no movie ever would have a score at all, you still would compulsively insist that there never was a better period for film music, it's just your nature.
What i think should be made clearer,especially in light of whom this messageboard is dedicated to, is that a lot of people think of film music as a way of vivid storytelling. And you can twist and turn, this isn't how music by and large functions today in film, and not only Hollywood, since a lot of non-HW-filmmakers of course are influenced by that, too. Of course there are bright spots and brilliant applications of music to picture, but that is really not the norm and also shouldn't include great song scores (we just as well might include cricket chirping then).
So in essence, i don't dislike a score like GIRL WITH A DRAGON TATTOO per se, i like quite a few Martinez or Mansell scores (recently: STOKER!) but i also see that they often don't function as great storytelling but more as loose moodsetters that often are rather vague in what they are conveying. This isn't to say they are bad or good, only that they are not able to direct my interest as the best Herrmann/Williams/Goldsmith-etc. scores could do. And that, for me is a fact that can be objectively proven. And those examples are still miles better than a lot - read. not all - factory-assembled RCP clone scores that range from GAME OF THRONES to the recent ENDER'S GAME.

The final verdict: citizen Koray Savas does not care about the scholars, the scholars do not care about Koray Savas. Good that we have settled this then.

Then we will all rejoice that the exciting complete score to POSEIDON ADVENTURE is released a third time.

Well, I certainly did back in my day, if that means anything. Fortunately, the flora of academic film music literature has blossomed in recent years.
One of the courses I taught at the time was media criticism, which includes a way to set criteria for any artwork. Of course, even such general criteria are tinged with a sense of subjectivity. It's impossible to avoid that in art criticism. That's one of the reasons why I love humanistic sciences over the 'hard' sciences. But the dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity will always be a 'hot topic', as evidenced above.

Thor, i know more than a few outside-Hollywood movies and i know that even if from this day on no movie ever would have a score at all, you still would compulsively insist that there never was a better period for film music, it's just your nature.
What i think should be made clearer,especially in light of whom this messageboard is dedicated to, is that a lot of people think of film music as a way of vivid storytelling. And you can twist and turn, this isn't how music by and large functions today in film, and not only Hollywood, since a lot of non-HW-filmmakers of course are influenced by that, too. Of course there are bright spots and brilliant applications of music to picture, but that is really not the norm and also shouldn't include great song scores (we just as well might include cricket chirping then).
So in essence, i don't dislike a score like GIRL WITH A DRAGON TATTOO per se, i like quite a few Martinez or Mansell scores (recently: STOKER!) but i also see that they often don't function as great storytelling but more as loose moodsetters that often are rather vague in what they are conveying. This isn't to say they are bad or good, only that they are not able to direct my interest as the best Herrmann/Williams/Goldsmith-etc. scores could do. And that, for me is a fact that can be objectively proven. And those examples are still miles better than a lot - read. not all - factory-assembled RCP clone scores that range from GAME OF THRONES to the recent ENDER'S GAME.

Not really comparable. Against Thor's steadfast claims to the contrary, i still say the Zimmer/RCP influence of the last 15 years actually contributed only in a) homogenizing and b) moving the genre of filmmusic away from being music for music's sake (which film music of course never was but at least it sometimes almost got there) to being a functional adjunct to the soundtrack.
This all is a futile discussion, since we all know there's the Thor/Koray side of things, and the...well, the other side, still, the big tragedy that so many great film music of the past got lost or unusable, while 70 minute long Atli-Ovarson-albums are released by the minute is perhaps the biggest disappointment. Since i rarely watch current movies anyway, i don't even complain about Hollywood movies getting the RCP treatment that much.

First, you don't even know if those artists you listed are that interested in labelling anything they produce as MUSIC, nor is THIN RED LINE ambient for the most part. It actually features extensive melodic writing (the complete score even more) quite unlike a lot of RCP scores.
Again, i think you rather casually assume that the few scores you actually like to listen to constitute the whole RCP output which, as my Spotify account time and time again testifies, is a bottomless pit of film and tv confections that often features two or three nice cues, usually heavily ethnic stuff, and lots of faceless droning.

A slight unease for me is to call all this MUSIC in capitals, now we talk about music production and act as if one of those typical 130-minute RCP scores is essentially the same as a huge Rózsa score just assembled a wee bit differently. May we at least say that whatever Zimmer and cohorts produce, it is not always and doesn't act always MUSIC per se, but in a lot of cases, sound design - as per the wish of the actual producers.
That's where my tummyache regarding 'revolutionary' comes in: if i take the genre of film music really as a MUSICAL genre, i don't know if that indeed was in any way revolutionized by modern aesthetics. A lot of it barely can be called music and isn't called up to be such (Horner complained in Vienna how composers now aren't even considered artists but technical personnel like ADR recordists and such).

My opinion is Zimmer is not revolution but influential. He owes a big part of his success to two things:
The ability to produce more widgets (music product) than anyone else faster and to speck via his army of minions thus inundating the “sound” of movies we expect to hear. The loss of nearly all real composers in a very short interval of time resulting in a dearth of alternatives (John Barry, Goldsmith, Bernstein, Kamen, Jarre, Poledouris). Meanwhile, JW slowed down in the past decade to only a handful of scores and was therefore not quite as impactful as he was in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Since HZ inundated movies given his ability to somehow work on multiple projects at the same time given his methods, and having so many alumni of his company – they were everywhere. He also had a string of huge hits (Pirates, Dark Knight, etc.) resulting in new group of directors saying “hey, I want a hit too…let me copy their formula”.
Since the alternatives have slowed down or died off – you get a lot of INFLUENCE of HZ and RC. A lot of films get temped with his stuff because directors think this is what movies sound like since there aren’t a lot of alternatives and Hollywood is not generally keen on risk.
JW is timeless whereas HZ is more of a fad that will fade away when alternatives make money and everyone starts emulating that new thing.

Can't you (all) think outside of your 'lush themes' vs. 'ambient' box? Are harsh Goldsmith 60's scores like SECONDS lush orchestral storytelling? Of course they are not, and still the score is able to convey a lot of á propos emotion in a very precise way in under 20 minutes - i don't find that level of dedication in most musical approaches these days, save a few scores like GHOST WRITER or TINKER TAILER SOLDIER SPY.
Will have an eye on the cornish score, Thor, but beware if it's just mediocre.