Film composer Antônio Pinto is known for his varied orchestral scores, which sometimes incorporate Brazilian folk influences and acoustic guitar. Earning his first feature-film credits in 1995, he soon provided the music for such internationally acclaimed films as 1998's Central Station, 2001's Behind the Sun, and the related movies City of God (2002) and City of Men (2007). He was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Original Song for 2007's "Despedida" from Love in the Time of Cholera, a song he co-penned with Shakira. Work in a variety of film genres followed, including the action film Snitch (2013), biopic The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2019), and supernatural indie drama Nine Days (2020). Meanwhile, he continued to find steady work in television, including the American TV adaptation of The Mosquito Coast, which premiered in 2021.

The son of famed Brazilian cartoonist Ziraldo, Antônio Alves Pinto was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1967. His older sister, Daniela Thomas, is a filmmaker. A skilled multi-instrumentalist, he earned his first screen credits with the family film Menino Maluquinho: O Filme and crime drama Foreign Land in 1995. He came to the attention of international audiences with his work on the 1998 film Central Station, a score he composed with Jaques Morelenbaum. A two-time Academy Award nominee, the movie won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.

Following work on two more acclaimed films, 2001's Behind the Sun (with Ed Côrtes and Beto Villares) and 2002's City of God (with Côrtes), Pinto contributed to the Brazilian TV spinoff, City of Men, which premiered in 2002. Following a number of other projects, including writing additional music for the Tom Cruise vehicle Collateral (2004) and acting as main composer for the Hollywood films 10 Items or Less (2006) and Perfect Stranger (2007), a 2007 film version of City of Men featured a score recorded almost entirely by Pinto alone in his living room. He was then nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Original Song for that year's "Despedida," which he wrote with Shakira for the film Love in the Time of Cholera. It and another Pinto-Shakira track, "Hay Amores," appeared alongside his score on a soundtrack release by Epic in early 2008.

Working then in both Brazil and the U.S., some of Pinto's projects over the next five years included the Formula One documentary Senna and the action films Get the Gringo (2012), Snitch (2013), and The Host (2013). Set in Brazil, the crime drama Trash followed in 2014, and his score for Tarsem Singh's Self/less was released in theaters and on the Varèse Sarabande label in 2015. He collaborated with Beto Villares and others on music for the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympic Games in Rio in 2016.

In addition to Brazilian TV series like Under Pressure (2017) and The Mechanism (2018), he scored features including the thriller O Banquete (2018) and the Netflix biographical drama The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2019) to close out the 2010s. Pinto returned to screens in 2020 with the film-festival favorite Nine Days, and his score for the first season of the Apple TV+ series The Mosquito Coast saw release in early 2021. ~ Marcy Donelson, Rovi