WHEN did it become acceptable for men to cry at a film?

One possible answer might be 1989.

I'd gone with a friend, a mature student, to see Field of Dreams, mostly because we thought Kevin Costner was a decent actor.

It was an affecting, engaging movie - and then, right at the end, came a scene in which Costner's character finally got to play catch with his long-dead dad. That was emotional enough on its own, but the killer touch was the gorgeously wistful music that composer James Horner had written for the scene.

The result? As the credits rolled, my mate and I sat there in the darkness, tears rolling down our cheeks. If wasn't manly to cry in the cinema, it was now.

I thought of that moment the other day when news came through of Horner's death, in a plane crash in California. He was just 61.

He had been amazingly prolific over his long career, working on more than 100 films. He wrote the music for Braveheart - during which, incidentally, he talked Mel Gibson out of basing the entire soundtrack on a piece of 13th century music he had happened to hear and like.

Horner was involved in Aliens, Glory, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind. He created the music for Titanic and in the process managed to persuade James Cameron to have Celine Dion sing My Heart Will Go On over the final credits. One of his last big successes as a composer was in another global hit for Cameron: Avatar.

It was Horner's magisterial work - his unerring ability to get to the emotional heart of a scene, or a film - that switched me on to film composers generally. I started checking out films that Horner, or Hans Zimmer, or Howard Shore, or John Williams, had lent their skills to.

Gladiator benefited from the magnificent score written by Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard; The Last of the Mohicans had a stirring, and quite brilliant, soundtrack, by Randy Edelman and Trevor Jones; The Mission may have starred Robert de Niro and Jeremy Irons, but what I remember equally well after all these years is the score, by Ennio Morricone.

There's no shortage of great film composers: Craig Armstrong, Patrick Doyle, Jerry Goldsmith, Maurice Jarre, Thomas Newman. Bernard Herrmann's work on Citizen Kane, Taxi Driver and various Hitchcock movies still electrifies you. The same goes for John Williams's score for Jaws, and Schindler's List.

I watched Field of Dreams again two nights ago, just to see if that closing scene or Horner's music had lost any of their emotional power.

No, it turns out. Not a bit.