Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
This post has been updated to account for the release ofA Star Is Born.
The intersection of alluring images and catchy songs remains a reliable money-maker.
There are a few exceptions.
Its hard to skip overShaftorSuperfly, even though they were created by single artists, exclusively for those projects.
(Sorry, Disney; sorry, MGM; sorry,Grease.).
But just about every modern musical genre is represented, from hip-hop to grunge to avant-garde classical.
39.Maximum Overdrive(1986)
Some of the best single-artist soundtracks function as de facto compilations.
Just grab a glow stick and hit the floor.
The winning performances of Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, and Arturo Sandoval helped sell that tale.
The results werent always especiallymusical, but they did demonstrate refreshing openness and imagination.
The songs blasting out of their car stereos suggest otherwise.
In the year of the American bicentennial, teenagers had never been so free.
The soundtrack is part of that joke.
Because what better way is there to score a film about guilty pleasures?
Which just goes to show: Who needs a big budget when youve got great tunes?
ButMo Better Bluesmay be the score thats closest to Lees heart.
The soundtrack too plays with the sounds of the city and the times.
But the best actual Beatles soundtrack comes from their worst picture.
The rambling, muddy-looking, made-for-TVMagical Mystery Touris a chore to watch: all inside jokes and secondhand psychedelia.
The soundtrack commodified the pervasive feeling in the culture that something vital was being lost.
17.Dirty Dancing(1987)
Thirty-two million copies.
1 song on the Hot 100 Singles chart.
15.Trainspotting(1996)
A film about Scottish heroin addicts shouldnt feel as full of life asTrainspottingdoes.
The musics mostly pretty and mostly danceable, but is underlaid throughout with a sense of worldly danger.
Who wouldve expected that a message from the genres future could be transmitted via some clumsy B movie?
Like the film, the soundtrack preserves an essential piece of musical history.
Sure, the songs are all machine-tooled to dominate the mainstream.
5.O Brother, Where Art Thou?
(Saturday Night Feveris another, as well asThe Bodyguard.)
Yet the soundtrack is bulletproof.
Hayess music was groundbreaking, too.
The movies almost unnecessary.
The album itself is plenty cinematic.
All thats missing is a hot rod.
