Zero Dark Thirty Madison Gate Records****

Last year was a remarkable one for Alexandre Desplat, as the award-winning French composer scoring an astonishing array of films, from Rise of the Guardians and Argo to Rust and Bone and Moonrise Kingdom. Desplat's last score of the year, for Kathryn Bigelow's procedural about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, is perhaps his most ambitious and original, as he infuses his delicate signature lyricism with darker hues and sharper intensity. Recalling his superb scores for Syriana and Argo, it combines spare orchestra, angular electronica and warm ethnic instrumentation to create a brooding and suspenseful score of simple melodies, sinuous rhythms and chromatic colours, which accumulates a surprising dramatic force and urgency. zerodarkthirty-movie.com

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