9. The Faces, "Ooh La La," Rushmore (1998)
All three movies in Wes Anderson's loose "juvenile lit meets The New Yorker" trilogy end the same way, with all the characters—friends, enemies, and family—moving together in regular- and slow-motion while an old rock song plays. It's energizing in The Life Aquatic, where the cast walks by the water to David Bowie's sassy "Queen Bitch," and it's moving in The Royal Tenenbaums, where they leave the cemetery to Van Morrison's hopeful "Everyone." But the gimmick was most effective in Rushmore, where young and old dance together to The Faces' "Ooh La La" and its valedictory chorus: "I wish that I knew what I know now / When I was younger." In a movie where music plays a major part in defining the mood and the characters—from the way The Creation's jumpy "Making Time" revives schoolboy mod cool to the way The Who's handcrafted mini-opera "A Quick One While He's Away" scores a montage of makeshift revenge—"Ooh La La" sends everybody out the door with a richer understanding of how in some ways, we're at our best when we're teenagers, even though we don't realize it until it's too late.
10. The Hollies, "King Midas In Reverse," The Limey (1999)
Steven Soderbergh introduces corrupt record-industry mogul Peter Fonda with a moody montage highlighting his wealth and elevated media profile, all set to a catchy, trippy song that UK's lite-pop-minded The Hollies wrote and recorded at the urging of Graham Nash, who wanted to drag his mates into the psychedelic era. Lyrically, "King Midas In Reverse" is a little on-the-nose for The Limey, pegging Fonda as a blinkered rich man who ruins whomever he gets involved with. But musically and historically, a minor Hollies hit fits a movie in which Fonda, Terrence Stamp, and Barry Newman play almost-forgotten—but still vital—'60s relics.
11. Pixies, "Where Is My Mind," Fight Club (1999)
In the waning moments of Fight Club, after Edward Norton has become "Jack's Massive Head Wound," but just before his raging id (a.k.a. "Tyler Durden," a.k.a. Brad Pitt) has blown America's oppressive credit history into dust and fire, a ghostly voice appears on the film's soundtrack, cooing "wooo-oo-oo" over rhythmic acoustic guitar. Then a slow, druggy beat and molten electric comes in, followed by the words, "With your feet on the air / And your head in the ground." And audience members of a certain age nod along, deliriously. "Where Is My Mind" is a provocative song choice by director David Fincher—perhaps the final pinprick in a film full of sometimes deflating, sometimes energizing switcheroos. What is that song in this place supposed to signify? Has Norton's floating consciousness shifted again? Did the whole movie take place in his head? Or maybe Fincher is just using the Pixies as cultural shorthand, since they're known for marrying punk anger, giddy pop, visceral shock, and grad-school indifference. Really, the whole of Fight Club is one big Pixies song, allowing grown-up ex-punks to vicariously live out the logical end to their long-abandoned high-school nihilism.
12. The Doors, "The End," Apocalypse Now, (1979)
Director Francis Ford Coppola only used a segment of The Doors' echoey, psychedelic elegy "The End" to open Apocalypse Now, perhaps because as the lyrics head off into imagery about ancient galleries of faces and seven-mile-long snakes, they become less open-ended and less applicable to his Vietnam War nightmare. But his indelible opening shots—a green field of palm trees disintegrating into flames under a rush of napalm, while Martin Sheen lies in his overheated hotel room, staring blankly at the ceiling—blend inextricably with Jim Morrison's hazy crooning about "a desperate land" where "all the children are insane." That's Vietnam as Coppola sees it, all right. And Morrison winds it all into a perfect package, forming a vocal link between the destruction and Martin's delirious detachment via gently delivered lyrics that summon up the titular apocalypse: "This is the end… / Of our elaborate plans, the end / Of everything that stands, the end." The song resurfaces in part at the film's climax as a linking motif, but what really sticks is Morrison's somberness and those initial images of a silent green world coming apart in flames.
13. Aerosmith, "Sweet Emotion," Dazed & Confused (1993)
The opening chords, punctuated by a rattle and swirling vocoder, tremble under the Gramercy logo and carry through the white-on-black top-of-the-line credits. Then the drums kick in, and boom, there's the first image of Richard Linklater's bittersweet nostalgia piece: An orange GTO convertible rounding a high-school parking lot in slow motion as Steven Tyler's voice stretches out "Sweet Emotion" along with it. A few joints are passed, friends and lovers congregate, and the stage is set for the last day of high school in small-town Texas, 1976. Linklater evokes that summer with perfect song selection throughout, but Aerosmith frames the film, which leads to nothing more or less ambitious than its characters driving off for concert tickets.
14. Foreigner, "I Want To Know What Love Is," Show Me Love (1998)
The original title of Lucas Moodysson's beautiful lesbian coming-of-age story was Fucking Åmål, which more plainly describes the stifling boredom of a young girl's life in the small Swedish town of Åmål. But when the heroine falls for another girl, suddenly her drab existence brightens with transcendent passion. When the two are left alone in the back of a car, the opening verses of Foreigner's hit "I Want To Know What Love Is" play softly in the background, only to explode into the chorus as the girls share a stolen kiss. It's a bracing moment for anyone who remembers the thrill—in this case, the illicit thrill—of first love.
15. Elton John, "Tiny Dancer," Almost Famous (2000)
Director Cameron Crowe cut his teeth as a precocious teenage music journalist, and his use of pop music to underscore crucial scenes has always been impeccable, from the iconic "In Your Eyes" serenade in Say Anything… to the eerie opening dream sequence of Vanilla Sky, cued to Radiohead's "Everything In Its Right Place." In the most memorable scene in Crowe's semi-autobiographical Almost Famous, Crowe's young surrogate has been on the road with a touring rock band for a long time, and everyone's tired of one another and hung over from some debauchery the evening before. Then Elton John's "Tiny Dancer"—a Top 40 hit that bands like this one would normally snort at—comes on the radio, and the entire bus slowly springs to life, singing in joyous unison when the song reaches its chorus. "I have to go home," says young Crowe. Abracadabra, "You are home."
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