The Lord of the Rings

This is Howard Shore’s Magnum opus. It’s what distinguishes this movie as more than just a great adaptation. His use of themes to represent not only races and kingdoms but characters, objects (like the One Ring, of course), and even concepts is a level above most movie soundtracks. There are even elements of storytelling through the music!

For example, the first time we hear the theme for Gondor is when Boromir is in Rivendell. Since he’s more or less alone, the theme is played by a single French Horn in a somber (almost tragic) style. In Return of the King, we see Minas Tirith, capital of Gondor, in all its glory, and so the full orchestra plays the theme.

One more: As the Fellowship begins to break down, so too does the theme. We go from heroic phrases to shorter, interrupted instances. There’s a book about the soundtrack written by Doug Adams. I highly recommend it if you’re interested!

• Pirates of the Caribbean (personally, At World’s End has the best, Hans Zimmer)
• The Lord of the Rings (Howard Shore)
• Gravity (Steven Price)
• Tron Legacy (Daft Punk)
• Moonlight (Nicholas Britell)
• Harry Potter (can only speak to the ones by John Williams)
• Braveheart (James Horner)
• The Matrix (Don Davis)

A few not listed:

• The Crow
• Empire Records
• Leaving Las Vegas
• Get Shorty
• Grosse Pointe Blank
• Pulp Fiction (listed elsewhere)

Into The Wild

The Blues Brothers - it’s literally stringing together performances from famous musicians, and the soundtrack was wildly successful as an album.

• Ray Charles
• James Brown
• Aretha Franklin
• Cab Galloway
• etc.

The Fountain, Requiem for a Dream, or anything by Clint Mansell

Tron Legacy, but that’s cheating as it’s essentially a Daft Punk music video.

This is an old one, but:

The Mission, scored by Ennio Morricone.

Conan the Barbarian

Resident evil

Dred 2012

Redline

Desparado https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0112851/

Amazing soundtrack!

The Matrix
O Brother Where Art Thou?
Forest Gump

Birdman. Just drums. Really fucking good drums. Also they appear in the middle of one scene in an excellent way.

Also: not a movie, but Cowboy Bebop. Lots and lots of great tracks.

Eraserhead, Side B

The album has been seen as presaging the dark ambient music genre, and its presentation of background noise and non-musical cues has been described by Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson as “a sound track (two words) in the literal sense”. -wikipedia

The mood and tone of Eraserhead and its soundtrack were influenced by Philadelphia’s post-industrial history. Lynch lived in the city while studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and was fascinated by its feeling of constant danger; describing it both as a “sick, twisted, violent, fear ridden, decaying place” and “beautiful, if you see it the right way.”[8][9][1] Lynch and Splet used avant-garde approaches to recording on the soundtrack; including crafting almost every sound in the soundtrack from scratch using bizarre methods. The ambiance of the love scene in the movie, for example, was produced by recording air blown through a microphone as it sat inside a bottle floating in a bathtub.[10] Lynch and Splet worked “9 hours a day for 63 days” to produce the soundtrack and all of the sound effects in the film. Splet recalls the sound effects Lynch called on him to produce for Eraserhead as "snapping, humming, buzzing, banging, like lightning, shrieking, squealing” over the five years it took to produce the film and its soundtrack. -wikipedia

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou

I know you said movies, but a soundtrack for a show I’m hooked on currently is Legion (FX/Marvel, on Hulu). The whole entire show has an amazing cast to begin with, but Jeff Russo (Fargo, Star Trek Discovery, more) and Noah Hawley put together one hell of a score. I highly recommend it and the show.