Vanity Fair‘s Julian Sancton has assembled a jukebox sampler of 11 movie-music clips, and after listening to most of them (I refuse to sample David Hirtschfelder‘s Australia music) it finally hit me why I’ve been so taken with Revolutionary Road all this time. Thomas Newman‘s score is so moving in its sadness and simplicity, so finely woven into the mood of the film (and vice versa) that it’s like a character unto itself.

The other films and their composers sampled in Sancton’s piece: Che (Alberto Iglesias), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Alexandre Desplat), The Dark Knight (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard), Defiance (Joshua Bell), Frost/Nixon (Hans Zimmer ), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ( John Williams), The Reader (Nico Muhly), Slumdog Millionaire (A.R. Rahman) and WALL*E (Thomas Newman again).