My slant on the best music in 2012 cinema … Steve Reich’s The Desert Music being deployed when all the kiddies are running for their weapoms, and the weakest are being slaughtered, in The Hunger Games.

Angelo Francesco Lavagnino, a prolific Italian film composer who wrote particularly notable scores for Orson Welles’ Othello and Chimes at Midnight. I’d place him at #20 and move everyone else down. Sorry Alexandre Desplat — but you have a long career ahead of you.

A lot of other contemporary composers (w/o naming names, but it includes some big ones ) I find bland and synthetic. Better to have composed a few brilliant, artistic scores that hold up well, even apart from the original context, than a whole bunch of derivative commercial product.

1. Bernard Herrmann (Citizen Kane; The Magnificent Ambersons; Jane Eyre; The Ghost and Mrs. Muir; On Dangerous Ground; Vertigo; North by Northwest; Psycho; Marnie; Fahrenheit 451; Cape Fear; Taxi Driver)

2. Toru Takemitsu (Woman in the Dunes; Dodes’kaden; Ran; Black Rain)

3. William Walton (The First of the Few; Henry V; Hamlet; Richard III)

4. Sergei Prokofiev (Lt. Kije; Alexander Nevsky; Ivan the Terrible)

5. Aaron Copland (Of Mice and Men; Our Town; The Red Pony; The Heiress)

6. Dmitri Shostakovich (The Maxim Trilogy; The Gadfly; Hamlet; King Lear)

7. Fumio Hayasaka (Rashomon; Ikiru; Ugetsu; Sansho the Bailiff; Seven Samurai)

8. Erich Wolfgang Korngold (Captain Blood; The Prince and the Pauper; The Adventures of Robin Hood; The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex; The Sea Hawk)

9. Virgil Thomson (The Plow That Broke the Plains; The River; Louisiana Story)

10. Nino Rota (La Strada; Nights of Cabiria; The Leopard; The Godfather)

11. Ennio Morricone (The Battle of Algiers; Days of Heaven; The Mission; Cinema Paradiso)

12. Joseph Kosma (Grand Illusion; The Rules of the Game; Children of Paradise; Port of Shadows)

13. Michel Legrand (Cleo from 5 to 7; The Thomas Crowne Affair; Summer of ’42; F for Fake; Yentl)

14. David Raksin (Laura; Force of Evil; The Bad and the Beautiful)

15. Miklos Rosza (Double Indemnity; Spellbound; The Lost Weekend; Julius Caesar)

16. Max Steiner (King Kong; The Informer; Gone with the Wind; Casablanca; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; The Searchers)

17. Elmer Bernstein (The Man with the Golden Arm; The Magnificent Seven; To Kill a Mockingbird; The Great Escape)

18. John Barry (James Bond movies; The Lion in Winter; The Cotton Club; Out of Africa)

19. Brian Easdale (Black Narcissus; The Red Shoes)

20. Georges Auric (Beauty and the Beast; Roman Holiday; The Wages of Fear; Lola Montes; Rififi)

21. Franz Waxman (Rebecca; Sunset Boulevard; Rear Window)

22. Leonard Bernstein (On the Waterfront)

23. Arthur Bliss (Things to Come; Caesar and Cleopatra)

24. Alex North (A Streetcar Named Desire; Spartacus)

25. Dmitri Tiomkin (Shadow of a Doubt; Strangers on a Train; High Noon; Dial M for Murder; Rio Bravo)

26. Alfred Newman (Wuthering Heights; The Hunchback of Notre Dame; All About Eve)

27. Henry Mancini (Touch of Evil; Breakfast at Tiffany’s; The Pink Panther)

28. Duke Ellington (Anatomy of a Murder; Paris Blues)

29. John Lewis (No Sun in Venice; Odds Against Tomorrow)

30. Giovanni Fusco (Hiroshima mon amour; L’Avventura)

31. Gabriel Yared (The English Patient; The Lives of Others)

32. Victor Young (The Quiet Man; Shane)

33. Bronislau Kaper (The Stranger; Green Dolphin Street; Lord Jim)

34. Maurice Jarre (Lawrence of Arabia; Doctor Zhivago; Passage to India)

35. Malcolm Arnold (Bridge on the River Kwai)

36. Leonard Rosenman (East of Eden; Barry Lyndon; The Lord of the Rings)

37. Andre Previn (Bad Day at Black Rock; Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse)

38. Constant Lambert (Anna Karenina)

39. Philip Glass (Koyaansqatsi; Kundun; The Fog of War)

40. Alexandre Desplat (The Queen; The Ghost Writer)