The Missing
Director Ron Howard has turned John Ford's Western iconThe Searcherson its paternalized head in what's essentially a remake--then given the story an unexpected twist of Native American mysticism to thoroughly confound its genre expectations. Composer James Horner eschews any hint of traditional Western motifs in his orchestral score, instead building a gradual sense of foreboding and mystery that ebbs and flows with a restless insistence, if little of the action film thunder that we've come to expect in Hollywood fare. The story's shamanic connections also come to the fore via indigenous wind instruments that seem more Andean than Native American, but in Horner's hands such choices only serve to underscore the score's spiritual dimensions in haunting new ways.  --Jerry McCulley