I just found this article on the Guardian website. It’s a bit old but quite well written. The author definitely takes a stance on what is good and what is bad classical music
Describing the music in the film Brief Encounter… “Philip Glass’s prepubescent minimalism, combined with Nicole Kidman’s Pinocchian prosthetic schnoz, makes the film both unwatchable and unlistenable.
Further, his take on Gorecki’ 3rd Symphony (a work I happen to enjoy) as soundtrack in the film Fearless is rather harsh.
Another is Fearless, the 1993 film about a plane crash survivor who cannot readjust to his previous life because he keeps hearing the ominous, molasses-paced third movement from Henri Gorecki’s lugubrious Third Symphony. But minimalism is not classical music à la Bach, Beethoven and Brahms; it is better described as learner’s permit classical music. Glass’s work doesn’t sound much different from Brian Eno’s, and Gorecki’s repetitive symphony sounds like it was composed in the 12th century for people who wish they were still living in the 11th, when composers still knew how to bang out a tune you could hum.
Well worth a read if you have the time. Here’s more from the article.
Films also help classical music from expiring. Classical music, used in hundreds of films, including movies where it is least expected, keeps the lofty art form in the public ear, even when the public does not know what it is listening to, or can barely hear the music in the background. It also helps that hundreds of movie scores are ripped-off versions of the classics, with Gustav Holst’s The Planets and Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring the most heavily plagiarised. People who claim to abhor modern music are actually listening to watered-down Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern every time they go to a cinema; those snippets and sound effects of doors creaking and aliens slithering and cars crashing and serial killers lurking are little more than “sampled” retreads of compositions written almost a century ago and now rewritten by music conservatory graduates masquerading as cutting-edge composers.
There’s also a very fine list of classical music works that have been used in film towards the end of the article.
Classical Music as Film Soundtrack 