After seeing Melancholia (twice) which uses Wagner supremely, I was thinking about movies that make really good use of their music. Here's a couple that stand out in my mind:
Melancholia
a Clockwork Orange
Watchmen
2001
Lord of the Rings (all three films)
What are your thoughts on this topic?
I'm a huge Wagner fan. I loved hearing his work in Apocalypse Now and Excalibur as well.
As for music in film, well, there are two animals for me: scores and soundtracks.
For soundtracks you have movies like The Big Chill that made the soundtrack something to be noticed. Other films with great soundtracks were The Crow, Pulp Fiction, etc.
For scores, yeah, I'm a huge score nerd. I love it when music really hits it and meshes perfectly with the narrative.
The film 1492: Conquest of Paradise was a really great example of that, imho, even though the film was a bit wonky, Vangelis blew my mind with his score. It went perfectly with Ridley Scott's flowing vision, banners in the breeze, discovery, the slow-motion moment (that's overdone nowadays).
I did like Lord of the Rings as well. I was fortunate enough to attend the symphony where they played music from the Lord of the Rings. Absolutely haunting. Just gave me chills (as it did in the film).
Glory also comes to mind. The Charging of Ft. Wagner is one of the most intense and powerful moments in cinema history and the music takes it to a whole new level.
Bram Stoker's Dracula had an AWESOME score. I actually heard some of that on American Horror Story a few nights back and thought "yeah!"
I'm a sucker for Conan the Barbarian (Basil P.) Still great after all these years.
Other scores that top my list:
Gladiator
Kingdom of Heaven
Battlestar Galactica (reimagined - "Razor" is beyond amazing)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Interesting story about CTHD, one of the pieces has its main melody played, then somewhere in the middle, the melody is played backwards and added as another layer on top of the forward-running melody. Awesome!
A new score I recently found was Ned Kelly (the Heath Ledger version). Definitely worth a looksee.
Children of Dune has a great score as well.