Drawing on everything from Dougal and the Blue Cat to Angel Heart, from Walter Murch’s “pickle jar” of sound to Tarantino-style needle drops, Kermode turns listening into a way of seeing: treat scores as storytelling, not wallpaper; hear nostalgia without depending on it; notice how rooms, acoustics, and “vibrations” change performances; and understand why live accompaniment can transform a film in the moment. Along the way: Ken Russell’s emotional maximalism, Under the Skin’s alien minimalism, American Graffiti’s jukebox world-building, and the strange alchemy that turns cues into cinema.

In an age of playlists and temp tracks, Kermode offers practical tools: the “trust Neil Brand” rule for live scoring (watch the film, watch each other), left-hand “semaphore” for staying in key, the needle-drop test (does the song deepen the scene or just decorate it?), room-tuning for performance energy, analogical listening (let pop, jazz, and electronics cross-pollinate), and permission to change your mind as the years—and the mixes—change. The result is criticism reimagined as a compassionate daily practice: not to win arguments about taste, but to listen better, feel more, and love movies more deeply.

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