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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) Feb 24, 2011 12:00 PM UTC by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) Feb 24, 2011 12:00 PM UTC ## West Side Story 
This film came with an impeccable pedigree: the original Broadway production featured lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, music by Leonard Bernstein and choreography by Jerome Robbins, and was itself an adaptation of Shakespeare's classic tragedy Romeo and Juliet. Young Puerto Rican immigrant Maria (Natalie Wood) and dreamy Tony (Richard Beymer) fall in love despite finding themselves on opposite sides of a gang war brewing in New York City between the Sharks (the Puerto Ricans) and the Jets (the whites). But it's not the story so much as the music that counts, from Maria's "I Feel Pretty" to Tony's "Maria" to ensemble classics like "When You're a Jet" and "America." The soundtrack spent 54 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 charts, still a record for any album of any kind. It won a Grammy for Best Soundtrack Album — Original Cast, and went triple-platinum. The film, meanwhile, won 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. micahernst ## Saturday Night Fever 
What's a dance movie without a killer sound track? A pretty lame one. That's why John Travolta's role as disco stallion Tony Manero had to be accompanied by songs that would make even the shiest wallflower want to throw on some bell-bottoms and clacky-heeled shoes for a night of rump-shaking. Saturday Night Fever wasn't all wide collars and satin leisure suits; while the fashions look pretty comical, the film is a weighty melodrama about a bunch of dead-end Brooklyn yoots who dance to take their minds off their dead-end jobs, dysfunctional families and pregnant girlfriends. The soundtrack, however, is irrepressible. Heavy on tunes from disco kings the Bee Gees, including "Stayin' Alive," "Night Fever" and "How Deep Is Your Love," it also features "If I Can't Have You" by Yvonne Elliman and "Disco Inferno" by The Trammps. The album topped the Billboard 200 for 24 weeks and was still charting in March 1980, well after disco finally died. micahernst ## Garden State 
Scrubs star Zach Braff not only made his debut as a film director with 2004's Garden State; he also wrote the script and handpicked the songs on the movie's sound track. Fans of Bon Jovi and the Boss beware: despite its title, Garden State goes easy on the New Jersey rock 'n' roll, opting instead for a perfectly curated collection of ennui-inducing mid-2000s indie rock. Included are tracks by Thievery Corporation, Iron & Wine, Frou Frou and two songs by the Shins — a group whose popularity skyrocketed after the album won a Grammy for Best Compilation Soundtrack for a Motion Picture. Of his musical choices, Braff said, "Essentially, I made a mixed CD with all of the music that I felt was scoring my life at the time I was writing the screenplay." micahernst ## Mary Poppins 
With its winning combination of commonsense medical advice ("A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down!"), classic Disney whimsy and Dick Van Dyke's horrid Cockney accent, this movie about an unhappy English family and the magical nanny who blew in on an umbrella was a smash success. Nominated for a total of 13 Academy Awards, the film took home five, including two for its soundtrack. Brothers Richard B. and Robert M. Sherman composed the film's songs, which won both Best Score and Best Song (for "Chim Chim Cher-ee," sung by Van Dyke and Julie Andrews). While most of its tunes are fun, upbeat numbers such as "Let's Go Fly a Kite" and the spell-checker-busting "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," the soundtrack's sleeper hit is the lullaby "Feed the Birds" — rumored to have been Walt Disney's favorite song. micahernst ## Grease 
The film adaptation of this hit Broadway show solidified the mainstream appeal of both its faux-'50s sound track and its lead actors, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. As star-crossed high school sweethearts Danny and Sandy, Travolta and Newton-John surprisingly sing only seven of Grease's 24 songs. Still, their tracks — particularly "We Go Together," "Summer Nights" and "You're the One That I Want" — were the film's biggest hits. Newton-John's rendition of the ballad "Hopelessly Devoted to You" was nominated for an Oscar for Best Song — although it lost to Donna Summer's "Last Dance," from the now forgotten disco film Thank God It's Friday. No matter: the Grease album is still one of the best-selling sound tracks of all time, and a sing-along version of the movie was even re-released in theaters in 2010. micahernst ## Flashdance 
This 1983 romance earned scorn from critics, but audiences loved Jennifer Beals as Alex, the welder by day, exotic-dancer by night who dreams of becoming a ballet star, and Flashdance was the third biggest box office hit of the year. Reportedly made with an eye (and ear) on the MTV crowd, the story line was intercut with scenes that relied on music — including Alex's audition finale — to make it seem like a series of music videos. The tactic appeared to work: within two weeks of the film's release, its soundtrack was selling 50,000 to 100,000 copies a day, in part on the strength of its two hit singles, Michael Sembello's "Maniac" and Irene Cara's "Flashdance ... What a Feeling" (which won an Academy Award for Best Song). The album ultimately sold more than 20 million copies. micahernst ## A Hard Day's Night 
It's a little misleading to call the album A Hard Day's Night a sound track. Yes, the songs are featured in the film A Hard Day's Night, a comic road picture following the band's misadventures on its way to a gig in London. Yes, the title track was written after Ringo Starr coined the phrase to explain his exhaustion after working on a movie set all night. But it's also a studio album, the Beatles' third, released at the height of Beatlemania in 1964\. By then, American teenagers had already succumbed to the mop-topped allure of John, Paul, George and Ringo. But A Hard Day's Night helped turn the group into more than just a passing fad. The album's 13 songs were all written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Listen to it today — especially the tracks "If I Fell," "Can't Buy Me Love" and "I Should Have Known Better" — and it's pretty clear that these lads from Liverpool were going to go far. micahernst ## Dirty Dancing 
As Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze) said, "Nobody puts Baby in the corner" — and nobody can create a list of the top sound tracks without taking Dirty Dancing into account. Though the film is set at a Catskills resort in the early 1960s, its score is a seemingly random mix of hits from the '50s, '60s and '80s that somehow just works. The original sound track spent 94 weeks on the Billboard 200; in 2007 RCA re-released a 20th anniversary album with additional tracks. From Swayze's ballad "She's Like the Wind" to the Oscar-winning climactic number "(I've Had) the Time of My Life," it was the music — rather than the provocative dancing — that made the film a classic. micahernst ## Pulp Fiction 
Released in 1994, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction was a bloody, nonlinear, 2.5-hr.-long pop-culture stew — and an instant hit. The film racked up an impressive $108 million at the box office that year and was nominated for seven Academy Awards. (TIME praised it, calling the film "Die Hard with a brain.") But the sound track, an eclectic collection of vintage hits from the likes of Ricky Nelson and Dusty Springfield — released, one must point out, during the height of grunge — was more of a surprise success. Pulp Fiction's sound track reached No. 21 on the Billboard charts. The album combines well-known pop classics (Springfield's "Son of a Preacher Man") with obscure tracks (the Tornados' 1962 surf-rock instrumental "Bustin' Surfboards") and snippets of movie dialogue to create the aural equivalent of watching Tarantino's film. micahernst ## Rushmore 
Think of your favorite Wes Anderson movie. Now think of your favorite scene. Is it the moment in The Royal Tenenbaums when Margo Tenenbaum steps off the bus to Nico's "These Days"? Or the one in The Life Aquatic when Steve Zissou takes his crew underwater to "Staralfur" by Sigur Ros? The most poignant moments in Anderson's films always contain music. In fact, the acclaimed indie director has said he often thinks of the songs before he thinks of the movie. If that's the case, surely his standout work came on this 1998 film.



Anderson originally wanted to fill his story of a precocious high school student, an idle millionaire and the teacher they both love with songs by the Kinks, but he soon changed his mind and went for a broader British Invasion theme. From the opening credits' "Making Time" by the Creation to the concluding song (the Faces' "Ooh La La"), Rushmore is an exercise in quirky indie sentimentality that still seems refreshing and original. micahernst ## 2001: A Space Odyssey 
It might be the most famous snub in movie-music history. Stanley Kubrick intended to create an original score for 2001: A Space Odyssey and commissioned the highly regarded film composer Alex North (A Streetcar Named Desire, Spartacus) to compose the music for his interstellar epic. But during editing, Kubrick inserted a temporary track of classical melodies, most famously synchronizing a spaceship's docking sequence to the Johan Strauss waltz "The Blue Danube." Looking at the results, the director realized he had infused his state-of-the-art science fiction with an aura of regal majesty; rather than providing audiences with emotional cues, the compositions framed the journey as something timeless and iconic. So Kubrick ditched North's score in favor of an unusual selection of classical music, stocked with the likes of German composer Richard Strauss and the avant-gardist György Ligeti. That Strauss's tone poem "Also Sprach Zarathustra," whose booming minute-long fanfare is synonymous with 2001, is one of classical music's most instantly recognizable works can be credited almost entirely to Kubrick. Though Strauss became known late in life for his operas, his other music was largely overlooked until Kubrick's masterpiece catapulted him into the pop-culture spotlight some 20 years after the composer's death. micahernst ## Trainspotting 
(Note: The above video contains images of drug use)



Rarely is a movie sound track so popular that filmmakers feel the need to release a second one. Trainspotting, Danny Boyle's film about a group of Edinburgh heroin addicts based on the book by Irvine Welsh, came out in 1996 riding a cresting wave of British pop. Its sound track deftly combines the music of contemporary bands such as Blur, Pulp and Elastica with earlier sounds by Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, and it sold so well that a second volume, featuring songs from the film that didn't make it onto the first one, was released the following year. Spiked with tracks by electronica acts like Underworld and Leftfield, Trainspotting helped introduce American audiences to '90s British music beyond Oasis and the Spice Girls. micahernst ## The Sound of Music 
Six years after its successful Broadway debut, the film version of The Sound of Music became a screen hit. Scored by Richard Rodgers, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, the soundtrack includes catchy classics like "My Favorite Things" and "Edelweiss." But what works on Broadway doesn't always work on the silver screen; critic Pauline Kael slammed the movie's music, writing, "We have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs." But it's precisely the feel-good, sing-along quality of The Sound of Music's tunes that have made them so endearing to audiences around the world. A 1999 article by London's Sunday Times reported that the BBC included the soundtrack on a programming list for an underground network of radio stations to keep Britons' spirits up in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Like raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, The Sound of Music sound track is, without a doubt, one of our favorite things. micahernst ## This Is Spinal Tap 
This Is Spinal Tap is without question one of the funniest comedies of all time. And while some of the fake rock documentary's best scenes are without music (think of guitarist Nigel Tufnel and his amp that goes to 11, or lead singer David St. Hubbins discussing his namesake, the patron saint of quality footwear), the real genius behind Spinal Tap is their music and the subtlety (or lack thereof) of their lyrics. Parody at its best is as much homage as it is mockery, and the 1980s hair-metal anthems — written by the film's stars, Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer — are spot-on. "Hell Hole" is an ode to living in squalor. "Stonehenge" is a send-up of Led Zeppelin's more rambling songs about Druids and twee British folklore. "Sex Farm" is just what it sounds like. But Spinal Tap's finest tune might be "Big Bottom," a love song to ladies carrying extra baggage, featuring arguably its best lyric: "Big bottom drive me out of my mind/ How could I leave this behind?" micahernst ## The Graduate 
The Graduate would be an unforgettable movie without Simon & Garfunkel. But their songs feel so intertwined with Mike Nichols' classic that it's hard to imagine seeing Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) driving along the California coast without "Scarborough Fair," or watching his listless summer memories melt into a montage without "April Come She Will." And "Sound of Silence" doesn't seem right without seeing Braddock lazily drinking a beer while drifting around his parents' pool. Of course, the biggest hit from the movie — and the song most indelibly associated with it — is "Mrs. Robinson." Simon & Garfunkel's coy "dee dee dees" seem to represent Braddock's strange relationship with the sexy older woman (Anne Bancroft), loved by Jesus more than she will know. micahernst ## O Brother, Where Art Thou? 
It's not often that a movie sound track wins a Grammy for album of the year. (In fact, it's only happened three times in history.) But O Brother, Where Art Thou? was so popular that it was widely acclaimed as not only one of the year's best albums but one of the finest sound tracks in years. It weaves together bluegrass, country, blues and gospel and features some of each genre's most soulful singers, including Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris. Krauss's version of the church standard "I'll Fly Away" is achingly beautiful, but the entire sound track is held together by the recurring "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow." An old folk song covered numerous times (it was even recorded by Bob Dylan in the early 1960s), the song becomes a hit for the film's fictitious trio, the Soggy Bottom Boys (for the sound track, it was recorded by Dan Tyminski, Harley Allen and Pat Enright). A spare blues riff that ascends to incredible heights on the back of its subtly changing melody and soaring harmonies, it became a real-world hit as well, reaching No. 35 on the country charts. micahernst ## Singin' in the Rain 
Singin' in the Rain is best known for Gene Kelly's splash-filled dance scene to the title song, which, according to legend, Kelly filmed in one take while fighting off a 103-degree fever. While the scene is one of the most memorable and joyful in cinema history, the film also includes a number of songs that are too often overlooked. "Make 'Em Laugh," a goofy ode to slapstick comedy, will get stuck in your head. The big-band number "All I Do Is Dream of You" is equally catchy, and "Good Morning" is a classic song involving incredibly quick tap dancing. But the title song of the film is so good, it's forgivable if you've forgotten about the rest. micahernst ## The Big Chill 
A tale of former college classmates who come together to mourn their friend's death, The Big Chill is at its heart a movie about disappointment and nostalgia, and the often blurry line between the two. Its sound track, too, is all baby-boomer throwback to the rock and Motown hits of the late '60s and early '70s that the movie's characters reveled in during their years at the University of Michigan. Featuring songs by Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and Aretha Franklin, The Big Chill's first sound track (its success prompted the release of a second, More Songs from The Big Chill) is full of the type of music that one might put on at a party to make their older relatives and coworkers feel comfortable. Yet the songs on this album are by now so ubiquitous and timeworn it's feasible to believe that there's no one on earth who wouldn't like them. It's also almost possible to forget that the sound track, like the film, co-opts the amazing work of talented black Detroit musicians for a story about whiny white Ann Arbor grads. micahernst ## Easy Rider 
It was the trip that changed everything, man. Easy Rider was one of the films that launched the New Hollywood revolution, in which young filmmakers rejected the studio system and sought to make movies that reflected the tumult of the times. A psychedelic road-trip hit that depicted the counterculture in full flower, Easy Rider also captured the sound of an era. With songs from the Band, Jimi Hendrix and the Byrds (as well as Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild," now forevermore linked to men on motorcycles), "this was one of the first times a movie was yoked to the driving power of '60s rock 'n' roll," writes film journalist Peter Biskind in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, his history of the New Hollywood.



The sound track happened almost by accident. Director Dennis Hopper recalled that Crosby, Stills & Nash were initially going to score the film, an idea he quickly nixed. In an interview with MovieMaker magazine, cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs said that editor Donn Cambern used many of the songs as a temporary background sound track for the film. "But the music became inseparable from the pictures," said Kovacs. "When the film was cut, there was a discussion about who was going to score it. They ended up licensing the music Donn was using. They spent $1 million licensing music, which was about three times the budget for shooting the rest of the film." micahernst ## American Graffiti 
George Lucas' American Graffiti asked the question "Where Were You in '62?" It should have been an easy enough one for moviegoers to answer, seeing as how the film was released in 1973, barely a decade later. But much as The Big Chill would in the 1980s, Graffiti capitalized on nostalgia for the not-too-distant past, with early-'60s rock songs from Bill Haley and the Comets, the Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Del Shannon and many, many others. Eschewing any sort of orchestral score, the film is entirely populated by jukebox hits, many of which emanate from the radios of the hot rods cruising the streets of Modesto, Calif. In between the songs are the ruminations of famous real-life DJ Wolfman Jack, who serves as American Graffiti's gravel-voiced Greek chorus. The film was a smash hit upon its release. Wisely, Lucas made sure to secure for himself the profits from sound-track sales, a precursor to his fortune-making decision to snap up merchandising rights for his next film, Star Wars. micahernst ## The Harder They Come 
In 1973 reggae had yet to make it on the radar of most American music fans, and for moviegoers, The Harder They Come was a gateway drug. The crime drama introduced unfamiliar listeners in the U.S. to Jamaican music, especially through the four songs performed by its star, Jimmy Cliff (who plays an aspiring musician who turns to crime), including the now legendary title track and "You Can Get It if You Really Want." The sound track also features songs by artists like Toots & the Maytals, the Melodians and Desmond Dekker, among others, and helped put many of them on the world stage. micahernst ## Singles 
In 1992, a year that saw Nirvana outsell U2 and knock Michael Jackson out of the top spot on the Billboard 200, the definitive grunge sound track Singles arrived. Just as Nirvana was the right band at the right time, Singles was the right movie. The film's score features a virtual checklist of bands from the then exploding Seattle music scene, including Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Mudhoney, and it helped cement grunge as the dominant sound of the decade. (Further bridging art and life, Soundgarden's Chris Cornell and the members of Pearl Jam made cameos in director Cameron Crowe's homage to his hometown.) Sure, at its core Singles is a fairly typical movie about 20-somethings dating and mating (occasionally both, often neither), but it's also a perfect snapshot of grunge's day in the (black hole) sun. micahernst ## Sixteen Candles 
If Sixteen Candles is for many the definitive portrait of '80s youth, then its sound track is the era's anthem. With artists like Wham!, the Thompson Twins, Billy Idol and David Bowie, the music perfectly captures the new-wave zeitgeist and its popularity among the film's gawky, insecure protagonists (i.e., all teenagers everywhere). The song selection was courtesy of Sixteen Candles' music-crazed writer-director, John Hughes, who crammed his film with more than 30 songs. Amazingly, the original sound-track release, now long out of print, contained just five. But even without the full collection, it's impossible to hear the Thompson Twins' "If You Were Here" — one of the five songs released — without picturing Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald) and Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling) leaning toward each other over Sam's candle-lit birthday cake. micahernst ## Superfly 
Curtis Mayfield tells it like it is. Rather than glorify the violence and wheeling and dealing of ghetto culture as other blaxploitation films of the day, his sound track for Superfly was a commentary on what he saw as a plague on America's streets. The hard-hitting, socially-aware album accomplished a rare feat when it outsold the movie to which it was set. "Freddie's Dead" — the film's unofficial theme song — laments the death of one of its main characters, a good-hearted man (played by Charles McGregor) whose work as a drug dealer ultimately leads to his demise. While hailed as one of the most influential albums in black history, its smooth funk sound, wailing guitar and horns also helped make the album one of the most important musical touchstones of '70s pop and R&B. "Curtis Mayfield's productions were a singer's dream and a musician's delight," Aretha Franklin wrote in a brief eulogy for TIME following Mayfield's death in 2000\. "We moved and grooved to his sweet, funky, soul-stirring musical scenarios, and said, 'Amen, that's right, go ahead,' as we related." micahernst ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7126020/the-25-best-movie-sound-tracks/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7126020/the-25-best-movie-sound-tracks/"},"headline":"Top 25 Movie Soundtracks","datePublished":"2011-02-24T12:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-16T07:01:58.359Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/archive/7126020/the-25-best-movie-sound-tracks/","keywords":["cinema","film"],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"TIME Staff","url":"https://time.com/author/time-staff/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/7126020/the-25-best-movie-sound-tracks/","name":"Top 25 Movie Soundtracks"}}]}] ```