With 94% on the Tomatometer and a corresponding 92% audience score, music documentary Beastie Boys Story is clearly resonating with critics and fans alike. The Spike Jonze-directed live documentary (who directed many of the Beasties’ music videos) happens to arrive via streaming at a time when mass live music concerts are all but a faded memory; it feels particularly timely to drop a retrospective of one of the most bombastic acts to have come out of the hip hop world in the past few decades.

The zeal in the zeitgeist for all things 80s—whether Stranger Things, the upcoming Wonder Woman 1984, or the recently-released Onward—coincides with the latent interest in musicals and/or musician-centred biopics, most recently observed in the upcoming remake of 1983’s Valley Girl.

Launched to much fanfare online—in part due to the shift in marketing budget allocations necessitated by the ongoing quarantine around the world—Quibi is a new streaming service with much in the way of style. The question, however, is whether a ceiling of ten minutes per episode is enough to give the so-called “quick bites” that stack the platform with enough substance.

While not necessarily the most concerning or impactful aspects of the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, the strident (and prudent) physical distancing measures implemented worldwide have nonetheless also impacted the film and television industry in a profound way.

Films such as Pixar’s latest, Onward, have been granted startlingly short windows from theatre to screen, having made the jump to Disney Plus in about a month. Elsewhere, films like Artemis Fowl (originally due May 29th) are skipping theatres completely, instead bolstering this year’s Disney Plus release schedule; higher-visibility franchises such as Mulan and Black Widow are being pushed to later in the year.

From Alan Yang (Master of None) comes Tigertail; due on Netflix April 10th, the upcoming feature focuses on a Taiwanese factory worker’s move stateside. It’s an intergenerational drama—Grover (Tzi Ma) moves stateside and grows up unsure of this decision, having left his love and home in Taiwan. His daughter, Angela (Christine Ko), appears to be going through a parallel struggle.

The coverage of comedy trailers continues for the time being with a new series by Greg Daniels (SNL, The Simpsons, Parks and Recreation, King of the Hill, The Office) for Amazon, Upload.

In these days of quarantine, it feels almost eerily prescient to have a comedy series in some sense emulate a life entirely lived online; the premise here is that your consciousness could be uploaded digitally to avert death.

Talking Heads’ 1980 hit “Days Go By” is the key musical track here, not covered or otherwise rearranged, but assiduously spliced and cut to match each scene and moment.

The initial teaser trailer for Pixar’s latest, Onward, used The Cars’ 1984 track “Magic,” with the lyrics making obvious reference to the movie’s fantasy setting while also fitting the film’s mix of 1980s nostalgia and aesthetics. This itself is something that has been a bit of a trend, whether looking at Wonder Woman 1984, the Stranger Things franchise, or others.

From Nisha Ganatra (director of 2019’s Late Night), The High Note follows the career of successful singer Grace Davis (Tracee Ellis Ross), whose proposed later-career album her assistant Maggie (Dakota Johnson) has ambitions to produce. It’s a drama following career ambition behind the scenes of the entertainment industry, not unlike Ganatra’s last film. The casting was almost certainly made with Ross’ mother, Diana Ross (of The Supremes fame), in mind—and Tracee Ellis certainly channels her mother’s spirit here.

Much like Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson has maintained the mantle of the auteur director, rightly earning the distinction of becoming somewhat of a genre unto himself. In addition to the distinctive visual palettes and impeccable sense of mise-en-scène, the musical landscape of Anderson movies tends to cleave to some key collaborators and aesthetic markers.

Chief among these would be his partnerships with composers such as Mark Mothersbaugh— and, in this case, Alexandre Desplat— the latter of whom has taken up scoring duty since 2009’s Fantastic Mr. Fox.

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.