Three from the ever-busy Jonny Greenwood…
Four years after Phantom Thread and You Were Never Really Here, Radiohead’s guitar-cruncher returns to film with three killer scores. For SPENCER (★★★★★), Greenwood captures the tension between pinched ceremony and sparking interiority in controlled bustles of baroque orchestrations and off-piste jazz. ‘Calling The Whipper In’ is exemplary, all call/response ceremonial rigidity and jazzy spritz; ‘The Pearls’ is ornate yet increasingly fraught, like the pearls are choking someone.
THE POWER OF THE DOG
(★★★★) favours dislocated western stylings, making familiar sounds strange. A plucked cello apes a banjo; strings mimic a tormented squeezebox; detuned pianos evoke damaged saloon songs. Greenwood’s closest cousin to There Will Be Blood, the result merges grandeur and intimacy in currents of unease.
Finally, nestled amid period hits, Greenwood’s LICORICE PIZZA
(★★★★) cue offsets his tensile tendencies with a luminous, Jon Brion-ish reverie. Wired or wistful, taut or tender, Greenwood rises to every occasion.