Score: A Film Music Documentary (Matt Schrader, 2016): USA

Reviewed by Nodoka Kobayashi. Viewed at Metro4 Theater at Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2017.

If you have ever fascinated by masterpiece movies such as Rocky, King Kong, and ET, I recommend you watch this film Score. This film is about film music as the title says, and it reveals how music is essential in a movie and how the composers are important staff in filmmaking.

Basically, it is focusing on a famous movies with famous theme music and famous featured scenes in it. Even if it is only a one minite sequence of climax, music can change emotion and controll overall impression of the scene. This film entirely tells how the music in those old films is used effectively and how are the ways of making film scores have been developed over decades.

What I was impressed was the piano player Rachel Portman plays the piano in front of the moniter screening one of the sequences of a movie. She plays the piano softly paying attention to the scene going on the monitor and her sound perfectly fit the scene even if it is just the test play. I felt excited that the visual and dialogue get together and matched with the music she plays.

There are many things we can learn about the power of music. Also, this movie explaining anout film music aproaching both emotional sensuous aspect and scientific statistics. It is so informative and we can feel how music gives influences greatly.