Top 10 Best Sound Designed Films of All Time

Cinefix, a Youtube community for movie buffs, has picked their ten favorite movies of all time when it comes to sound design. Here’s their introduction:

From explosions in pitched battle to the judicious use of silence; from Foley effects to fully immersive soundscapes, what you hear in movies shapes the experience of watching them in ways you may not even consciously realize at the time. And these 10 movies illustrate that fact wonderfully.

Check out their selection in the video below:

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Click any chapter to jump to that moment in the player above:

00:00Intro 00:37Saving Private Ryan 01:55Das Boot 04:51Stalker 06:00A Man Escaped 08:04Gravity 09:11Star Wars 10:19WALL-E 12:12Eraserhead 13:17The Conversation

Their top 10 picks

Watch the video first if you want to avoid spoilers. Here is the full list, in the order they appear:

Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Director: Steven Spielberg
Sound Designer: Gary Rydstrom

The soundscape of the landing at Normandy is epic and personal in turns, thanks in large part to the soundscape the audience is immersed in.

Das Boot (1981)

Director: Wolfgang Petersen
Sound Design By: Milan Bor, Trevor Pyke, Mike la Mare

So much of the sound that creates the claustrophobic atmosphere of the German submarine had to be-recreated in post by master artists who worked on this film.

M (1931)

Director: Fritz Lang
Sound Design: Fritz Lang

One of the earliest “talkies” M had the opportunity to be truly experimental in its sound design… and the results are amazing.

Stalker (1979)

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky

Stalker paints its bizarre landscape with sound every bit as much as it does with image.

A Man Escaped

Director: Rober Bresson

Thanks to the focused minimalism of sound, we feel the prisoner’s anxiety about being dissevered as much as he does.

Gravity (2013)

Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Sound Design By: Glenn Freemantle

There is no sound in space, but there is vibration – Because the sound effects are so limited in Gravity, the audience forced to feel the same isolation and urgency as the characters.

Star Wars (1977)

Director: George Lucas
Sound Design By: Ben Burtt

Ben Burtt’s creative use of real-world sounds to populate a sci-fi/fantasy universe gives this classic film that right combination of fantastic and familiar.

Wall-E (2008)

Director: Andrew Stanton
Sound (and voices) By: Ben Burtt

Ben Burrt returns to the sci-fi world to create all the sounds that made Wall-E so charming, the abandoned Earth so desolate, and the futuristic space ship so… futuristic.

Eraserhead (1977)

Director: David Lynch
Sound By: Alan Splet

The torturous industrialized environment of Eraserhead pretty much wouldn’t exist without the sound to pull it off.

The Conversation (1974)

Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Sound Design By: Walter Murch

Halfway through this story about a paranoid surveillance technician, traditional dialogue drops away, forcing us to live in the same soundscape as Harry Caul.

(via Stephen Saldanha / Cinefix)

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