Classical music is a medium that provides enough range and talent to assist all sorts of movie scripts. From the most classic indie movie of all time to a few foreign horror films, classical music is the backbone of these fantastic Hollywood soundtracks:

• A Clockwork Orange (1971): Symphony No. 9 Ode To Joy by Ludwig Beethoven
  Malcolm McDowell plays a charismatic, sociopathic delinquent whose interests include classical music and what’s termed “ultra-violence”. In the novel, he’s accidentally conditioned against all music, but in the film, he’s only conditioned against Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

• Manhattan (1979): Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin
  As Woody Allen’s love letter to New York City, Allen stars as a frustrated television writer who’s facing middle age alone after his wife (Meryl Streep) leaves him for a woman. As he begins dating a fresh-faced high school girl (Mariel Hemingway), he begins to wonder if his best friend’s brilliant mistress (Diane Keaton) might make a better match.

• The Hunger (1983): The Flower Duet by Léo Delibes
  This British horror film stars Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie, and Susan Sarandon as the pawns of a love triangle between a doctor who specializes in sleep and aging research and a vampire couple. The piano adaption of The Flower Duet bodes well for a sultry scene where Deneuve plays the piano for Sarandon.

• Platoon (1986): Adagio For Strings by Samuel Barber
  With a tense melodic line and taut harmonies, Barber’s composition is considered by many to be the most popular of all 20th-century orchestral works. It works well for this film, starring Charlie Sheen as a student who leaves his university studies for combat duty in the Vietnam War and finds himself in the middle of a more personal battle.

• Bagdad Café (1987): The Well-Tempered Clavier by JS Bach
  This comedy-drama stars Marianne Sägebrecht as a German tourist who storms off to the nearest outpost of civilization after an argument with her husband over car trouble strands them along the American Southwest highway. Upon arriving to the Bagdad Café, she forges an unlikely friendship with the owner (C.C.H. Pounder).

• Drowning By Numbers (1991): Sinfonia Concertante: II. Andante by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
  Joan Plowright plays a woman who drowns her cheating husband and enlists the help of an old friend with a longstanding weakness for her (Bernard Hill) to cover it up. Everything goes under, though, when her daughter (Juliet Stevenson) and granddaughter (Joely Richardson) resort to the same method for solving conflicts with their frustrating husbands.

• The Big Lebowski (1998): Requiem by Mozart
  This indie film stars Jeff Bridges as Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski, a laid-back, easygoing burnout who happens to have the same name as a millionaire whose wife owes money to a lot of dangerous people — resulting in The Dude’s spiral into Los Angeles’ underworld.

• Eyes Wide Shut (1999): Musica Ricercata: II. Mesto by György Ligeti
  Tom Cruise plays a physician whose wife (Nicole Kidman) admits to having fantasies about a man she met. Cruise’s character becomes so obsessed with having an intimate encounter that he attends a meeting of an underground group and quickly discovers that he’s in over his head.

• Heaven (2002): Spiegel im Spiegel by Arvo Pärt
  This classical composition appears in no less than 12 films, including Heaven. The film stars Cate Blanchett as a British teacher living in Italy, who’s seen many friends and her husband fall victim to drug overdoses. After unsuccessful contact with the police about the city’s biggest drug dealer, she doles out her own form of justice.

• Melancholia (2011): Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner
  This drama-psychological thriller details the possibility of a rogue planet hurtling toward a collision course with Earth as two sisters (Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg) cope with the approaching doomsday in different ways.

• Behind The Candelabra (2013): Prelude In E minor, Op.28, No.4 by Frédéric Chopin
  This film stars Michael Douglas as a world-famous pianist who takes Matt Damon’s character as his much younger lover, but their relationship becomes turbulent when cheating and drug use ensues. 

If you’d like to hear the soundtracks of other cinema greats, including Titanic, Romeo And Juliet, and Forrest Gump, grab tickets to Forbidden Love on June 17, 2017 at 7:30 p.m. by clicking below: