The Hunt for Red October and Crimson Tide mark the swan songs of a long-standing genre: the cold-war-theme action thriller (and its subgenre, the nuclear-submarine-threat potboiler). Given the music here, composer Basil Poledouris must have sensed the end was nigh, for he pulls no punches. Poledouris (who seemingly wrote the score to Red Dawn as a warm-up exercise) has created a full-bodied orchestral swashbuckler with a male chorus (singing in Russian, of course) to boot; a modern take on the Erich Korngold/Errol Flynn film sensibility that ably demonstrates there's still life in those traditions. --Jerry McCulley