Best of 2013: Original Score

Best Original Score

• Hans Zimmer for 12 Years a Slave, because however much it lifts from his past work, Zimmer's music cues potently balance the heightened emotional directness of its subject with the sincere but open-ended approach to Solomon's catharsis.

• Daniel Hart for Ain't Them Bodies Saints, for taking the familiar narrative and emotional setup of its pastiche-laden script to unexpected places, indubitably calling up its influences, while offering jittery, alert and affecting edges of its own, however rough they can feel.

• Stuart A. Staples for Bastards, because even after 18 years of collaboration, Staples remains just as crucial to Denis's prepossessing formal intuition, setting tensile, serrate and eerily sensual tones to his director's slick and shadowy atmosphere.

• Cliff Martinez & Skrillex for Spring Breakers, for blending so seamlessly into its pop-fueled sound design, not necessarily in a way that induces a vexed superiority, but moreso in a way that evokes the specific and appropriately mystical ambience of the movie and its central characters/figures.

• Shane Carruth for Upstream Color, for already steering his own film to its inscrutable yet kind of transfixing plane of existence, but also utilizing his formidable and equally mesmeric musical stylings as a way of establishing the mood and setting that are key to its charms.

Honorable Mentions (Alphabetical Order): All is Lost, Antiviral, Berberian Sound Studio, Blue Caprice, Gravity, Her, Only God Forgives

Missed: Oblivion, Philomena (I know, I know. But I just can not work up the interest.)

Not Released in Time: Mekong Hotel, which would have easily made the top five had it been released in the U.S. (which it probably won't be).