Thomas Newman

In 2008's Revolutionary Road, music is the third character in a taut drama played out between two suburbanites straining against the confines of their conventional 1950s lives. A few musical ideas return throughout the film -- a piano figure, a huddle of strings -- and they act as a kind of signal: as the lens pulls back, we begin to sense that nothing in the film will end happily. Thomas Newman's uncluttered score mimics the cultural desert of a suburban landscape, and it loans the film a Terrence Malick-esque spaciousness it might not have otherwise achieved. Bravo.