Film Score Daily: Film Score Friday 12/29/17

IN THEATERS TODAY

All the Money in the World - Daniel Pemberton - Score CD due Jan. 12 on Sony (import)
Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool - J. Ralph
In the Fade - Joshua Homme - Score CD due Feb. 2 on Milan
Molly’s Game - Daniel Pemberton - Score CD on Sony
Phantom Thread - Jonny Greenwood

COMING SOON

January 5
The Death of Stalin - Christopher Willis - MKVA (import)
Howards End - Nico Muhly - Milan (import)
Lady Bird - Jon Brion - Lakeshore
January 12
All the Money in the World - Daniel Pemberton - Sony (import)
Downsizing - Rolfe Kent - WaterTower
The Post - John Williams - Sony
Thief of Hearts - Harold Faltermeyer - Varese Sarabande
January 19
24 Hours to Live - Tyler Bates - Varese Sarabande
January 26
Babylon Berlin - Johnny Klimek, TomTykwer - BMG (import)
Hangman - Frederik Wiedmann - Varese Sarabande
February 2
In the Fade - Joshua Homme - Milan
The Mercy - Johann Johannsson - Deutsche Grammophon
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) - Randy Newman - Lakeshore
Star Trek: Discovery - Jeff Russo - Lakeshore
February 9
Churchill - Lorne Balfe - Filmtrax
A Fantastic Woman - Matthew Herbert - Milan
Hostiles - Max Richter - Deutsche Grammophon
Mark Felt - The Man Who Brought Down the White House - Daniel Pemberton - Filmtrax
Maze Runner: The Death Cure - John Paesano - Sony
Date Unknown
A Common Enemy - Alejandro Roman - Rosetta
A Dream Come True - Javier Quilis - Saimel
Jose Nieto 75 Aniversario - Jose Nieto - Saimel
Lisa - Gabriel Yared - Caldera
Queen's Messenger - Stelvio Cipriani - Kronos
Reallive - Lucas Vidal - Rosetta
Salvatore - Questa e La Vita - Paolo Vivaldi - Kronos
Shadow Girl - Jorge Aliaga - Rosetta

Peter Debruge, Variety

GET A JOB - Jonathan Sadoff

"In a parallel universe, Kid would have followed the same career trajectory of smart, observant filmmakers like Joshua Marston ('Maria Full Of Grace'), Ira Sachs ('Love Is Strange') or Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck ('Half Nelson'), but he seems to possess no instincts or control for this brand of comedy, which makes the entire effort smell even hinkier. 'Get A Job' is the equivalent of Kidd’s 'Accidental Love' -- the disastrous and ultimately mishandled comedic effort that David O. Russell removed his name from. But similarly, as much as 'Accidental Love' was sabotaged by a studio that finished it without its director, even the best version of that film seems inherently misguided. Having experienced a labored editing delay, its clear that someone meddled with 'Get A Job', as the godawful, pedestrian score by Jonathan Sadoff reeks of someone else’s terrible decision. But while there’s the temptation to lay blame at the feet of the producers, 'Get A Job' feels fundamentally foolhardy, and it’s difficult to remove all culpability from the filmmaker himself."

Rodrigo Perez, The Playlist

KRISHA - Brian McOmber

"Music also plays a crucial role in the film’s style. The unexpected horror movie-like cacophony of strings that accompanies the aforementioned first close-up already commands attention, and Brian McOmber’s score just gets stranger from there. To a montage of Krisha trying to cook a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner while interacting with members of her extended family, McOmber unleashes a barrage of non-melodic electronic noise, some of it sounding like the aural equivalent of a pinball smacked around in a machine. But then, when Krisha pops open that fateful wine bottle, McOmber’s music becomes exultant, surely expressing Krisha’s own relieved mindset in the moment."

Kenji Fujishima, Paste Magazine

"For a first film, made on a shoestring with a largely non-professional cast, 'Krisha' is remarkably textured. Brian McOmber’s score adds urgency to otherwise-quiet scenes: His galloping percussion in the middle going, and horror-movie violins toward the end, suggest a racing heartbeat under Krisha’s hippie aphorisms and pretense at calm. But the scenes without music feel even more fraught. The cast feels comfortable with the naturalistic dialogue, and they create a convincingly intimate environment."

Tasha Robinson, The Verge

"Based on 2014 short film, Shults’ feature-length debut was shot in nine days and the cast mainly features members of his family. It constantly runs the risk of devolving into a form of cinematic family therapy. Yet the personal dimension of the project mainly involves its continuing fixation on Krisha’s subjectivity, with impressively choreographed long takes and Brian McOmber’s jagged, disorienting score taking prominence over much in the way of straightforward exposition."

Eric Kohn, IndieWire

"Watching 'Krisha' is a revelation: there are expected "rules" for such material (a former addict returns home for a holiday), but then director/writer Trey Edward Shults breaks every rule, making those rules seem tired and arbitrary in the process, and he does so with bravura, confidence, flash. While the style is in-your-face, every element of it (a show-stopping score by Brian McOmber, Drew Daniels' camera-work, Shults' editing) is in service to the story, and to the story beneath the story, how destroyed this family has been by Krisha's addiction. 'Krisha' (which won the Grand Jury prize at the 2015 SXSW Film Festival) is an assault, from the first unforgettable moment on, and Shults' style clues you in from the get-go that this won't be your familiar 'addiction/redemption tale.' This is going to be something very, very different. This tour de force is even more astonishing when you learn that it is Shults' first feature. 'Krisha' is both realistic and deeply surreal. Shults leaps around visually, from the nephews wrestling in the yard, to Krisha tearing the kitchen apart looking for the oven-timer, the camera whirling around her in dizzying 360-degree turns, to Robyn and her husband having whispered worried pow-wows in the corner, as Krisha peeks at them anxiously. The noise is deafening inside the house, but the sound drops out when Krisha is alone. The frantic score would be appropriate for a horror film, and in a lot of ways 'Krisha' is a horror film (the first moment evokes pure psychological terror)."

Sheila O'Malley, RogerEbert.com

"Some members of the ensemble are professional actors, notably Fairchild, whom her director nephew swears is nothing like movie-Krisha in real life. Others are non-professionals and family members taking part in Shults' bittersweet labor of love. You don't notice anybody's acting. The film's chronology, thanks to Shults' free-association editing, has a way of keeping us off-balance; the same goes for composer Brian McOmber's nervous, skittery musical score. (There's also a striking use of the Nina Simone cover of 'Just in Time.')"

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

"Shults takes the viewer inside Krisha's fragile mind, an unnerving place that hides and compartmentalises dark demons. Part character study and part family portrait Shults keeps his camera in constant motion and guides it over his many players to frantic amplified string music designed for a jumpy and disorientating experience. This display of technical prowess matches his emotional insight as events develop."

Katherine McLaughlin, The List

"And so to escalating melodrama, choreographed within an inch of its mesmerizingly high-strung life. The higher Krisha gets, the more Shults turns her decline and fall into a weirdly potent oratorio that forces us to see Krisha's family from inside her addled head. As the camera lurches from one banal domestic scene to another, the incidental noise rises to a hysterical clatter further amplified by composer Brian McOmber's echoing, atonal score. Thus a normal holiday gathering transforms itself into a cauldron of pent-up rage and resentment that neither begins nor ends with Krisha."

Ella Taylor, NPR

"But this is Krisha’s film completely. Shults bookends the movie with full-frame closeups of her face, and the final shot as such is devastating. The plot is concerned with struggles common to addiction: it’s not unlike 'A Woman Under The Influence' but is blended with the f**k-it abandon of 'Bellflower.' Shults and his DP Drew Daniels shift aspect ratios when the mood calls for it, and Brian McOmbers’ score (in addition to a well-placed Nina Simone tune) crashes in at odd times to signal a shift. If the inventive compositions and moves don’t always work, they keep up with Krisha’s emotional state nonetheless."

Charlie Schmidlin, IndieWire

"The wine scene is preceded by shots of the dusk sky and all the sadness it can imply. And once the bottle is opened, a live version of Nina Simone’s 'Just in Time' plays, complete with audience laughter. What follows, a slightly slow-motion pan of the happy family while they wait for the turkey to be done, is mesmerizing, with occasional shots of Krisha almost diabolically smiling. It’s an unusual musical choice, and not the only one Shults includes: Every now and then there’s a soundtrack of keys, but the notes seem stabbed instead of flowing. The music sets you off kilter, farther kicking you down into Krisha’s black-sheep world. Because you never really learn what Krisha did to estrange herself from her son and the rest of her family, the oddness of the soundtrack as the camera follows her grips you and leaves you wanting to know more."

Tricia Olszewski, The Wrap

"There’s an extended shot in Trey Edward Shults’s remarkable debut feature, 'Krisha,' that’s a showstopper of bad vibes, a psycho-symphony that bumps the film to a different -- more ominous -- level of reality. The title character (played by Krisha Fairchild) is a bedraggled woman in her 60s who arrives for Thanksgiving at her sister’s spacious home, eager to prove to all the relatives she has hurt or abandoned that she’s different now -- clean, sober, responsible, eager to belong. Too eager, maybe. She has asked to make the turkey herself, and it’s a monster; as she stands in the open kitchen, arranging her utensils, conversing with her sister and niece, the sound of her own voice drops while the surrounding noises rise. Chairs scrape, doors slam, plates clatter to the floor, someone passing murmurs into a phone, someone bounces a rubber ball. A roar goes up from the men in front of the game on TV, and the camera jerks their way and then back to the kitchen. The score (by Brian McOmber) sounds like Maxwell House–commercial percolations plus discordant plinks that might have been timed to mess with your heartbeat. Krisha seems to be moving at a different speed than the other characters. You watch her smile and nod and try to find her center, and you know that that center cannot hold. The chaos inside her unbalances the material world."

David Edelstein, New York

"The first shot of 'Krisha' is of the title character herself: surrounded by darkness, framed center, the music swelling ominously, the camera slowly pushing in on her face as she struggles and fails to fight back tears. Who, the audience has to wonder, is this sixtysomething woman, losing her composure before the film has even begun? Don’t ask her family, the multiple generations of estranged relatives that welcome her, reluctantly, back into their lives for a holiday meal, some 10 years after she walked out on all of them. They’ve got questions of their own. Like, where has she been? And why did she leave in the first place? And what happened to the bandaged stub she used to call a finger? 'As soon as I have anything incredibly revealing to say,' Krisha promises, 'I will come to you and say it.' But there will be more disastrous decisions before there are answers.Unfolding across an especially long and awkward Thanksgiving Day, 'Krisha' creates an audio-visual language of social anxiety; it’s practically a horror movie about the horror of being the unwanted guest at the party. Almost every stylistic choice -- most of them quite dynamic, especially for a first-time director -- has been made to serve Krisha’s subjective perspective, her 'jumpiness.' Rhythmic montages of activity, scored to the atonal plucks of Brian McOmber’s sinister score, somehow turn the mundane activities of a holiday get-together -- preparing the meal; watching the big game; horsing around in the yard -- into sources of unease. These are private family rituals, not for interlopers. Likewise, several conversations are shot from eavesdropping distance, the camera creeping down hallways or lingering in doorways. 'Krisha' keeps Krisha always on the outside, unable to participate."

A.A. Dowd, The Onion AV Club

"The young director Trey Edward Shults suggests as much by opening with a close-up of Krisha (played by the director’s aunt Krisha Fairchild) staring into the camera, her lined, tanned face framed by a mass of springy gray hair that might as well be a mess of snakes. She’s isolated in the shot, and, as she continues to stare and the eerie music gets to shrieking, you might think -- it won’t be for the first time -- that this looks and feels a lot like a horror movie. Though it’s one, after a fashion and too many drinks, that finally owes more to the likes of John Cassavetes than the usual genre influences."

Manohla Dargis, New York Times

"Based on an amalgam of autobiographical elements, Shults' cathartic take on dysfunctional free spirits and the damage done feels like nothing less than a cinematic exorcism. The first-time director knows how to capture the chaos of holiday get-togethers and raucous revelry, but all the retro slow zooms, dread-inducing Steadicam-style shots and ominous droning on the soundtrack key viewers that this isn't a family drama so much as a domestic horror film -- 'The Shining' with metaphorical ghosts. (Massive kudos to cinematographer Drew Daniels for hijacking Kubrick's visual vocabulary as an effective vehicle for expression rather than just mindless fanboy gushery.) A history of emotional violence emerges in conversational bits and bitter glances, as this earth-child's shiny, happy facade starts to fade and she slowly goes into human-earthquake mode."

David Fear, Rolling Stone

"There’s barely a moment in 'Krisha' that doesn’t flaunt the tormented state of its titular protagonist, with the quivering strings that score the slow opening zoom onto her clenched visage already screaming that this is a woman under the influence. In the same way that Krisha (Krisha Fairchild) can’t help returning to the bathroom to ingest yet another illicit substance, writer-director Trey Edward Shults’s film is unable to escape its one-note perspective on its protagonist, ramming home her relentless downward spiral though an incessant parade of grandstanding stylistic flourishes...Such comparative subtlety flies out the window, however, when a now drug-addled Krisha reenters the family fray, as a veritable deluge of new tricks are progressively unleashed to convey her mood. While the turkey is being prepared and various, largely anonymous family members cheer the big game playing on the television or mill around in another subtly distorting single shot, the camera now also jerks back and forth in reaction to any disturbance, as a hectic combination of piano and strings rattles away on the soundtrack. Soon Schults is swooping the audience through the garden alongside a group of running dogs, cutting to impromptu arm-wrestling contests, or practically nosediving into piles of chopped vegetables, as the previously established spatial and temporal coherence also begins to unravel. If the message behind this cacophonous mélange is that this is how the silver-maned Krisha perceives the world when she’s high, it’s been received loud and clear...The film’s overbearing style is in any case always in danger of overwhelming the mono-directional plot. The warping effect of the wide-angle lens often makes it hard to even properly identify the various family members who aren’t placed in the center of the frame, the roaring soundtrack and heady sound design frequently drowning out the dialogue, and the discontinuous editing actively preventing the family home from feeling like a tangible, real-life place. The emphasis on style over content is particularly evident when certain salient conversations are presented more conventionally, such as Krisha’s tentative attempt to reconnect with her son or a teary last-act exchange between her and her sister, both of which cannot help but feel leached of intensity when set against all the previous formal fireworks."

James Lattimer, Slant Magazine

"Krisha is greeted warmly enough (perhaps a bit too warmly), and she reciprocates with an eagerness to make herself useful, putting herself to work in the kitchen while Robyn heads out to fetch their wheelchair-bound mother (Billie Fairchild, Shults’ grandmother). As Krisha sets about gutting the turkey, Shults whips the character’s movements into a montage of high anxiety, his swift edits keeping time with the chop-chop-chop of the knife and the percolating rhythms of Brian McOmber’s score. By the time the music fades, the cutting slows and the mood relaxes, it’s clear that 'Krisha' means to reveal its protagonist’s perspective not through exposition, but in the very texture of the filmmaking -- varying its syntax so as to draw us ever deeper into one woman’s profound sense of alienation from those around her. It’s that lingering, bone-deep empathy that brings a charge of authenticity to the film’s mercurial technique, which can seem as precociously showy as it is undeniably striking -- never more so than when Shults and d.p. Drew Daniels occasionally shift aspect ratios (from 1.85:1 to 2.35:1 to 1.33:1) over the course of the taut 83-minute running time. For the most part, they employ the camera with grave deliberation, whether panning steadily back and forth during Krisha’s conversation with Doyle or taking in the house’s well-appointed, high-ceilinged interiors. McOmber’s score at times seems to channel some of the more audacious and inventive film music of recent years, from Jonny Greenwood’s compositions for Paul Thomas Anderson to Mica Levi’s dissonant strings in 'Under the Skin.' "

Justin Chang, Variety

"Krisha’s isolation amid the noise is both poignant and threatening. The creeping dread is heightened by Tim Rakoczy’s sound design and the strings-and-digital score by Brian McOmber, which stands front and center with the dynamic visuals. Two shifts in aspect ratio (from standard 1:85 to 2:35 widescreen, and finally to 1:33), though organically executed, are unnecessary. The performances and fluent camerawork require no such changes in the frame to convey the sense of a world closing in on Krisha."

Sheri Linden, Hollywood Reporter

OUTLAWS AND ANGELS - Colin Stetson, Alexis de Carvalho

"Though this Western’s Morricone-evoking soundtrack and heaps of gore suggest a serious Tarantino addiction, writer-director JT Mollner also put me in mind of 'The Witch,' his attention to period detail and the moral arc of his trapped female protagonist, Florence (Francesca Eastwood, whose mother, Frances Fisher, also make a brief appearance)."

Sara Stewart, New York Post

"The film stays faithful to that form on aesthetic levels, too, from the plentiful blood spurts to the imposing compositions, color palette, zoom-lensing and grainy 35mm stock of Matthew Irving’s widescreen cinematography. Performances are seldom subtle yet effective and credible, abetted by flavorful dialogue whose archaic turns of phrase and evergreen expletives alike have the tang of careful period research; the costume and production design contributions also have an authentic feel. The soundtrack pays homage to genre greats like Morricone while also providing less predictable accompaniment, including deliberately incongruous use of some familiar classical themes."

Dennis Harvey, Variety

THE NEXT TEN DAYS IN L.A.

Screenings of older films, at the following L.A. movie theaters: AMPAS, American Cinematheque: Aero, American Cinematheque: Egyptian, Arclight, LACMA, Laemmle, New Beverly, Nuart and UCLA.

December 29
HIS GIRL FRIDAY (Morris Stoloff), BALL OF FIRE (Alfred Newman) [Cinemathque: Aero]
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (Maurice Jarre) [Cinematheque: Egyptian]
RESERVOIR DOGS [New Beverly]
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY [Nuart]
WAR MACHINE (Nick Cave, Warren Ellis), AMERICAN MADE (Christophe Beck) [New Beverly]

December 30
THE BARGAIN [Cinematheque: Egyptian]
DANGER: DIABOLIK (Ennio Morricone) [New Beverly]
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (Maurice Jarre) [Cinematheque: Egyptian]
MARY POPPINS (Richard Sherman, Robert Sherman, Irwin Kostal) [New Beverly]
TWENTIETH CENTURY, TRUE CONFESSION (Frederick Hollander) [Cinematheque: Aero]
WAR MACHINE (Nick Cave, Warren Ellis), AMERICAN MADE (Christophe Beck) [New Beverly]

December 31
DER FAN (Rheingold), CHRISTIANE F. (Jurgen Knieper) [New Beverly]
MARY POPPINS (Richard Sherman, Robert Sherman, Irwin Kostal) [New Beverly]

January 1
HORSE FEATHERS, ANIMAL CRACKERS [Cinematheque: Aero]

January 2
WORKING GIRLS [LACMA]

January 3
FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER (Marco Beltrami) [Cinematheque: Aero]

January 4
BOOGIE NIGHTS (Matthew Penn) [Laemmle NoHo]

January 5
BLADE RUNNER (Vangelis) [Nuart]
CASABLANCA (Max Steiner), KID GALAHAD [UCLA]
THE MAN FROM EARTH (Mark Hinton Stewart) [Cinematheque: Egyptian]
PRINCE OF DARKNESS (John Carpenter, Alan Howarth), ALICE COOPER: WELCOME TO MY NIGHTMARE [Cinematheque: Egyptian]

January 6
FEMALE, THE STRANGE LOVE OF MOLLY LOUVAIN (Leo F. Forbstein) [UCLA]
AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL: TRUTH TO POWER (Jeff Beal) [Cinematheque: Aero]

January 7
ALAMAR (Diego Benllieure) [UCLA]