Jonny Greenwood: There Will Be Blood

Over the course of four films, director Paul

Thomas Anderson developed a stock company of actors and collaborators. For his

fifth, There Will Be Blood, he parted ways with the familiar, including

musical cohorts Jon Brion and Michael Penn, whose carnival-esque cabaret sounds

helped define films like Boogie Nights and Punch Drunk Love. Instead, he called on

Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood. Greenwood has been moonlighting as a

composer for a few years, and he could probably make a full-time go of it,

based on his work here. His score alternates between dissonant atmospheric work

("Henry Plainview," the title track) and delicate, almost-but-not-quite-pretty

string pieces ("HW/Hope Of New Fields," "Prospectors Quartet"), all of it shot

through with a doomed sense that things are on the verge of going horribly

wrong. In other words, it matches the film perfectly.