It’s the top of the year, and that means it’s awards season—and we don’t just mean the Golden Globes! Each year, we hand out the most prestigious (in our opinion) and peculiarly specific awards to some of the most notable trailers in the previous year, with a particular ear, of course, to their use of music and sound.

On tap this week is A24's hugely anticipated Mother Mary, a psychosexual pop thriller that reunites director David Lowery with the indie studio for a third round, following A Ghost Story and The Green Knight. Lowery himself called it a "weird, weird film" at the Melbourne International Film Festival—so expectations are appropriately, uh, weird? In that lovely A24 way we've come to expect.

Marvel is going in all kinds of bold creative directions with their recent trailers. In recent weeks they began releasing standalone trailers for the character arcs of individual cast members of Avengers: Doomsday due out in December (with trailers for Steve Rogers and Thor released so far, might there be a full 25 more of these to come?). This approach sure throws the Teaser Trailer / Official Trailer / Official Trailer 2 model out the window.ııı

Christopher Nolan’s storied directing career so far has been as varied as it has been consistent, largely oscillating between vast historical events and intellectual sci-fi every few years. Cue The Odyssey, due for release three years after the cultural moment that was Oppenheimer, which sticks to the historical side of his work. Notably, Ludwig Göransson returns to score this one, marking a creative partnership that promises to endure; Göransson’s penchant and curiosity for the unconventional while staying firmly grounded in character-driven scoring served Nolan’s creative vision well in Tenet and Oppenheimer, and it looks like this partnership has only deepened.

I’ll be honest - sometimes we choose a trailer to blog about just for its use of a hit song that the Trailaurality bloggers–Curtis Perry and I–love from our childhoods. And that’s the primary justification this week for revisiting Project Hail Mary (yes, we did already blog about its first Official Trailer, back in July). But you have to do that sometimes (this year we also blogged about Wicked For Good trailers 1 and 2, because…obviously).

Minority Report meets The Fugitive? The first twenty seconds of this near-future drama (cue the quadcopter twelve seconds in) finds a justice system that is largely automated. The conceit here is that a detective, accused of his wife’s murder, has ninety minutes and counting to prove his innocence—lest he’s assumed guilty. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov (Ben-Hur, 2016) and starring Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson, the opening expository dialogue is set to a custom arrangement of French electronic music producer Gesaffelstein’s 2013 release, “Hate or Glory”, put together by music agency The Crystal Creative. 

Sea of Monsters–the second novel in Rick Riordan’s wildly successful series–hits Disney+ this week. The official trailer for Season 2 of Percy Jackson and The Olympians opens with Percy (Walker Scobell) narrating the nightmare we’re seeing on screen. The accompanying music is a minimalist piano melody in A minor, with a repeated high register piano note as we’ve heard before. Percy wakes up from his dream, and at 0:21 as he says “I’m Percy Jackson,” we see an animated underwater Disney+ logo light up the screen.

Emerald Fennell has adapted Emily Brontë’s 1847 gothic novel, and it bears all the hallmarks one might expect from the director who brought us Saltburn and Promising Young Woman. Beyond the visual, however, is a standout collaboration on the aural side—taking both a page and a step further from similar musical tie-in conceits, Charli XCX (remember Brat summer?) has come out with a concept album of the same name.

This week we’re taking a close listen to the trailer for Chloé Zhao’s new film Hamnet, winner of the 2025 TIFF People’s Choice Award. The trailer opens with the sounds of birds as we see Agnes (aka Anne) Hathaway (Jessie Buckley) looking up at birds in flight, while sustained strings and wordless choir swell in with a cluster chord in B flat major. The closeness of the notes brings a sense of intimacy, and also wonder. It mirrors the majesty of a hunting hawk perching on Agnes’ glove at 0:06.

The latest foray into the antics of one of the Britain’s comedic national treasures, Rowan Atkinson, has landed—to the tune of some eight million views and counting in the last week, proving the man perhaps best known as Mr. Bean holds his star undimmed. But he speaks here!

The first 10 seconds of the teaser for Antoine Fuqua’s new film Michael feature no music. For this biopic about the King of Pop, we open with a close up of Jaafar Jackson (cast as his uncle Michael) putting on headphones in the studio. Voiceover from Quincy Jones (played by Kendrick Sampson) makes a meta reference “I know you’ve been waiting a long time for this.” It’s true we have. This film has been in development since 2019.

Scored by trailer music house Alloy Tracks, the latest instalment in the Now You See Me heist film franchise (2013, 2016, 2025) sees an AAA ensemble cast including Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco, Isla Fisher, and Morgan Freeman return alongside newcomers Justice Smith, Dominic Sessa, Ariana Greenblatt, and Rosamund Pike. Brian Tyler returns as composer and Ruben Fleischer directs.

This week we’ll explore the official trailer for Park Chan-wook’s new film No Other Choice, which recently won the International People’s Choice Award at TIFF.

The trailer opens with a spin on the original series theme by Nathan Johnson, this time with tubular bells carving out that signature rising minor motif, suggesting the sacred context and accompanied by pizzicato strings for intrigue. At 0:21 the strings almost rise out of control, only to be grounded by blaring synth at 0:23 alongside a ticking sound. Carrying on the sacred context a wordless choir punctuates the monologue of the series star, detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig); the ticking doubles up at 0:38 as our intrigue deepens over the story of a monsignor (a kind of priest) who appears to be murdered just out of plain sight—a “classic impossible crime”, in Blanc’s words.

Starring Tessa Thompson and with music Hildur Guðnadóttir, there’s no shortage of reasons to get excited about Amazon Prime’s Hedda, a lesbian love triangle drama film set in the upper crust of 1950s British society–it’s Nia Da Costa’s fresh take on a Henrik Ibsen play.

In a refreshingly original story written and directed by Ugo Bienvenu and produced by Natalie Portman, the premise is simple but poignant: What if “rainbows are actually time travellers from our future”? Arco, a ten-year-old boy living in the year 2932, decides to travel in time two years before he is allowed—and ends up stranded in the year 2075, meeting Iris, offering a perspective on both the near and far future.

We’re less than two months out from the theatrical release of Jon M. Chu’s epic Wicked: For Good. Let’s check out the film’s Final Trailer, which Universal released last week. We’ll see how it compares to the film’s Official Trailer that we analyzed back in June.

Even in the wake of (or despite) recent controversy, a Star Wars film is still a sure bet some six years after The Rise of Skywalker. Rather than start a brand new story arc, however, this spinoff film continues the hit Disney Plus series The Mandalorian, with Pedro Pascal reprising one of his most successful roles alongside Grogu (or “Baby Yoda”, should you prefer).

Edward Berger (Conclave, All Quiet on the Western Front) is back with a new film: Ballad of a Small Player, based on Lawrence Osborne’s book by the same name.

Directed by Oliver Hermanus and released by MUBI, The History of Sound is based on a pair of short stories by Ben Shattuck detailing students Lionel and David’s relationship while attending the Boston Music Conservatory circa 1917, as they travel together recording the folk songs of people across rural Maine.