

But even if the film gets lost to the mists of time, its soundtrack shouldn’t be, being an immaculately-assembled love-letter to ’90s hip-hop. Jonathan Levine’s likable, slight Sundance coming-of-ager about a weed-dealing New York teen ( Josh Peck) in 1994 who falls for the daughter ( Olivia Thirlby) of his psychiatrist ( Ben Kingsley) isn’t likely to go down in the annals of film history, as sweet-natured and well-made as it is. Like the film, it’s not a deep, substantial piece of work, but it’s a pretty great party. You can sneer at the already seemingly played-out rebranding of dance music as EDM and the teens who love it, but there’s a generation of kids who’ll grow up with the same affection for the soundtrack for Harmony Korine’s neon crime pic “Spring Breakers” that old farts hold for “ The Breakfast Club” or “ Pulp Fiction.” Supervised by the great Randall Poster and with a score by Cliff Martinez and everyone’s favorite girl-from-The-Ring lookalike Skrillex, the choice of songs works as a pretty perfect time capsule of a very particular time in youth culture, with strobe-y pop and dance from Ellie Goulding and Nicki Minaj, and speaker-shaking hip-hop from Waka Flocka Flame, Meek Mill and Gucci Mane to name but a few (plus James Franco, perhaps inevitably, singing more than once). We understand if you don’t believe us -there’s a reason The Fader described this soundtrack as “a music snob’s worst nightmare” and we wouldn’t have thought anything featuring Eiffel 65‘s “Blue” could ever make a Best of the Century list either- but watch the film, feel your heart soar during goddamn “Wonderwall” and talk to us after. With songs from Celine Dion, Sarah MacLachlan, Dido, Oasis and Counting frigging Crows, it’s basically aural Ovaltine: unbelievably middle-of-the-road blandness/terribleness that become completely transportative in context. So the soundtrack to Xavier Dolan‘s “Mommy” is essentially going to have to stand for all of those films, and indeed no better exemplar could there be.

But that may mean we’re possibly being a little unfair to films that use music we pretty much loathe in totally transcendent ways, within the context of the movie. The vast majority of soundtracks on this list are the type of thing we’re happy to listen to outside of the films they accompany, as albums per se. READ MORE: The 50 Best Foreign Language Movies Of the 21st Century So Far Let us know your favorites in the comments. We excluded scores (like, say, Grizzly Bear‘s for “ Blue Valentine”), single-artist soundtracks (like the recent “ Straight Outta Compton,” which is essentially a greatest hits), or films of Broadway musicals (like “ Chicago” or “ Hedwig And The Angry Inch”), but almost anything else could be considered. And with summer putting music on our minds, we decided to tackle soundtracks next: below, you’ll find our 25 favorites of the last 16 years.
PULP FICTION OST RAR SERIES
Last week, we looked at the Best Foreign Language Films since the year 2000, part of an ongoing series examining the 21st century in cinema so far.

READ MORE: The 50 Best Animated Films Of The 21st Century So Far But there’s still little like a moment where a master filmmaker deploys the exact right songs at the exact right time, and anyone who thinks the soundtrack is dead these days is simply wrong.
PULP FICTION OST RAR MOVIE
Whereas once every hit movie was accompanied by a single and music video, now many big films don’t even release a compilation of songs featured therein. We’re no longer in the golden days of the soundtrack of the 1980s and 1990s. The 50 Best Film Scores Of The 21st Century So Far We’ve long since expanded our interests to all manner of movies, and more recently TV, but it’s an area that we’ve always kept tabs on, from reporting the latest news as such to our annual Best Soundtracks Of The Year post. Many moons ago, when The Playlist first began, we had a special interest in the place where movies and music met.
