Due in North American theatres this March, the British production Radioactive is a dramatic biopic about the discoverer of radioactivity and the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. While the trailer score is relatively standard fare considering the genre and subject matter, a few key synch points and a clever, aurally ambiguous moment distinguish this trailer from others like it.

As with the annual San Diego and New York Comic Cons, the Super Bowl is another enduring mass audience congregation both in the United States and around the world, and prime media real estate for all kinds of audiovisual advertising, not the least of which is the Super Bowl teaser trailer. In anticipation of an extraordinarily large audience, studios exploit the opportunity to roll out first or major previews of important upcoming releases, unveiling cinematic trailers on television which for sports pubs and home theaters means big screen airings. Here are just a few of said trailers we found especially interesting in one way or another in their use of music and sound.

Paramount’s The Rhythm Section is a thriller centred around Stephanie Patrick, who embarks on a quest for vengeance after she finds the place crash that killed her family was intentional. An earlier trailer from September focused on a cover version of Lead Belly’s classic blues song “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”, this time by Sleigh Bells. This last trailer — the film is due out January 31 — is much more dialogue-heavy, and focuses, in a titular nod, to the rhythm of the proceedings. 

After a 6-second micro teaser that features the key motif from the universally-popular Beethoven piece “Für Elise”—for whom the celebrations for the 250th anniversary of his birth are underway—the trailer begins with an unknown, offscreen diegetic narrator addressing Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto). The soundscape in the initial fourteen seconds is close and almost claustrophobic, fitting considering Morbius is bullied and in the fetal position in the schoolyard as a child in this opening scene.

John Krasinski’s well-received break-out hit A Quiet Place drew attention on this blog last year for its relative absence of music; the trailer for its follow-up, the aptly-appended Part II, continues this approach.

Now in our third year, as we close 2019 we wanted to look back and honour what we thought were a few key trailers that really moved the needle in terms of the art of placing film in concert with sound and music in a small-scale narrative form.

As we begin to close out this year—and decade—the barrage of polarized political news finds either a reprieve or a conduit, depending on how one may approach it, with In the Heights.

Set in the eponymous Washington Heights, a neighbourhood in northern Manhattan, New York, the musical is set to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s words and melodies, while Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) takes the director’s helm.

Undoubtedly the breakout hit of the DC Extended Universe that Warner Bros. Pictures is pushing to capitalize on the past decade of Marvel’s dominance in theatres, Wonder Woman receives its due sequel in June 2020. Its first trailer drops just in time for the holiday season, and as per the title no time is wasted to foreground the new film’s central conceit as evidenced in the title—worlds away from World War II, instead we have Gal Gadot in the time of neon and synthesizers.

We are once again on the verge of holiday trailer season, and among the first out of this proverbial gate comes promo for the long-anticipated conclusion to Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond, No Time To Die.

While Trailaurality covered Knives Out previously, this last trailer—more of an homage than a parody or satire—is more than worth a look and listen.

6 Underground, the new Netflix special starring Ryan Reynolds and directed by Michael Bay, is exactly what you might suspect that particular pairing would produce: In essence, this is Deadpool’s Italian Vacation, with the deft mix of action and comedy that title implies.

In Pixar’s latest, Soul, Joe Gardner is a middle-school band teacher, but he wants to be a jazz musician; more than that, he feels he’s born to do it. After Joe’s rhetorical question—with Jamie Foxx’s readily identifiable voice first taking the fore—we hear “Overture (The Click)”, a 2017 track by AJR, an American pop band known for for being multiinstrumentalists self-producing their material in their apartment.

From director Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha) comes Marriage Story, an somewhat ironically titled film considering it follows the dissolution thereof through divorce proceedings.

“Lucky Trumble” by Nancy Wilson, originally released as part of 2000’s Almost Famous soundtrack, arrives anew in this trailer and covers the first twenty-seven seconds as our two protagonists recount what they admired about each other, up until a gentle breaking point when they both notes simultaneous that the other is “very competitive.”

The trailer for Netflix’s The Laundromat, a Steven Soderbergh-directed, Meryl Streep-starring satire about the Panama Papers, arrived just last Friday; it owns a playfulness in its dialogue and narrative that is matched in the way it so effusively engages in an interdiegetic interplay between voice and music.

As sure as the October air, NYCC 2019 has come and gone, and with it left a minor dust storm of this fall’s slate for streaming television. Much like our San Diego Comic Con writeup before it, here are just a few of the trailers that caught our ears for their diverse uses of music and sound to punch up the image.

Ian McKellen (Richard III [1995], The Lord of the Rings trilogy, among others) is at full front and centre here in this second trailer for Bill Condon-directed The Good Liar. Narratively, the film centres on career con artist Roy Courtnay’s difficulty performing what ought to have been a simple swindle of rich widower Betty McLeish, but he finds himself inadvertently enamoured of her.