John Williams brought a new muscularity to symphonic film music with his bustling scores for the pop epics of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

As the writer of hits like "Macarthur Park," "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," "Where's the Playground, Susie" and "Wichita Lineman," Jimmy Webb is a patriarch of lachrymose, existential pop epics with soaring tunes.

Mr. Depp carries the picture, but it's a light and flimsy contraption masquerading as a pop epic (A. O. Scott).

The duel makes a fitting conclusion to a pop epic that has spread itself through J. K. Rowling's seven volumes, totalling forty-two hundred pages, and then eight films, taking up almost twenty hours of screen time.

As the writer of hits like "Macarthur Park" and "Wichita Lineman," Jimmy Webb is a patriarch of lachrymose, existential pop epics with soaring tunes.

The indie album was lauded by a Spin Magazine review, and in REVOLVER Magazine Ann Powers wrote, "For melodic sweep, the prize goes to Holcombe Waller, whose self-released Extravagant Gesture is a small pop epic."

"The Godfather," though, is one of the great pop epics, and it won't be easy for Random House to come up with a writer with both Puzo's genuine sensibility and his pulpish, National Enquirer imagination.

The songs are noticeably less rooted in electronic music, although "Swinging London Town" is "a dark, squiggly synth pop epic" and "It's Magic" is composed of "little Royksopp-like keyboard riffs".

From the modern symphonic action music of Mr. Spielberg's pop epics to the tingly electronic music of the contemporary horror movie, to the sleek pop-jazz of sophisticated comedies, good movie music can now be tailored to the genre and to the mood of the moment, with a fine-tuned precision made possible by technological advances.

The production of the song was described as "a dark, squiggly synth pop epic a la Pet Shop Boys," while the lyrical content was compared to Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls".