The new soundtrack to the film Sweeney Todd earns five out of five on BroadwayWorld.com's holiday roundup list of the year's best CDs. "This recording is a 'must-have!'" raves the review. It "is just glorious," writes Naomi Plume. "The performances grab you in a whole different way than you would expect," she says. "I am also happy to report that [orchestrator] Jonathan Tunick and [conductor] Paul Gemignani deliver up their usual 'magic'!"

There Will Be Blood tops the list of the indieWIRE poll of more than 100 critics looking at the year's best in cinema. The film earned the critics' votes for Best Picture, Best Director and Screenplay for Paul Thomas Anderson, Best Performance for Daniel Day-Lewis, and Best Cinematography for Robert Elswit. Paul Dano also garnered the number four slot for Best Supporting Performance.

Time Out Chicago's film staff lists There Will Be Blood among the year's best. Hank Sartin, the magazine's film editor, places the "sprawling yet intense epic" on the top of his list, and the film writer Ben Keningsberg says Daniel Day-Lewis "gives the performance of the year."

Daniel Day-Lewis has been nominated by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) as Best Actor for his performance in There Will Be Blood. The 14th Annual SAG Awards will be handed out in a ceremony broadcast live on TNT and TBS on January 27.

There Will Be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson spoke with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air yesterday about the making of his latest film, from the joys of working with Daniel Day Lewis to the dangers of recreating an out-of-control oil-derrick fire to the film's haunting score by Jonny Greenwood. When Gross asks why the music works so well, Anderson answers: "All the credit goes to Jonny." You can hear the conversation here.

The Star-News out of North Carolina says Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd  "deserves a wide audience." The Star-News review praises Burton for making "easily the best movie musical of 2007" and creating for it a concept that "works brilliantly." In the end, it's Sondheim's score that proves to be "the real hero of the show." In the film, "the music is powerful ... but what strikes you is how lyrical it is" and "far more complex and interesting" than your standard musical-theatre fare.

The LAist calls Tim Burton's film version of Sweeney Todd a "wonderful, hilarious, inspired" work. "[L]et there be no doubt that Tim Burton has crafted a true piece of musical cinema from Stephen Sondheim's bloody masterpiece." In the title role, Johnny Depp is "magnificent," his performance "so powerful as Todd that you eventually begin to relish his countless murders." Ultimately, "Sweeney Todd joins Ed Wood and Edward Scissorhands as Burton's finest work."

In his review of There Will Be Blood for Reuters news service, John DeFore writes that Jonny Greenwood's "captivating" score is an important player in the film, "greatly contributing to the sense that tectonic forces lie beneath the drama." 

The San Diego Film Critics Society has named There Will Be Blood the winner of four awards, including Best Score for Jonny Greenwood. Awards for the film also went to Paul Thomas Anderson for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay (based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!) and Daniel Day-Lewis for Best Actor. The San Diegan critics also recognized Sweeney Todd's Dante Ferretti for Best Production Design.

"[W]hen you hear something as audaciously new as There Will Be Blood," writes iF magazine, "it’s a listening experience akin to coming across an oil gusher in a movie theater—the kind that blows your seat (and ears) to the ceiling with the sheer, often-insane beauty of what you’re hearing." With an originality that "spurts in spades," Jonny Greenwood has created an "entrancing" score. "Greenwood shows he can do orchestra with the same innovative quality that he approaches Radiohead’s trance-rock with ... And like P.T Anderson’s best soundtracks, Greenwood achieves a musical f-you wallop that grabs our attention ... [W]e feel that Anderson and Greenwood have taken us on a journey into sound that’s truly new for film scoring." The film "offers a major discovery in the talents of Jonny Greenwood."

"Every time I’m about to watch a Daniel Day-Lewis movie," writes Variety's Stuart Levine on MSNBC, "I expect to be floored—to be brought into a world I’ve never seen and be enveloped by a character who I will undoubtedly obsess about for days, if not weeks ... Right now Day-Lewis is the Robert De Niro of the late 1970s-early ’80s, back when De Niro was a god among mortals." In There Will Be Blood Day-Lewis has made "as powerful and compelling a character as he’s ever created."

Jonny Greenwood's There Will Be Blood soundtrack is out in the UK today, and musicOMH says the music sets the scene well for the film's early-2008 release there. "As scene setting goes," says the site, "this is something pretty exceptional, the rising melody lingering in the memory even after the first listen." Come Oscar time, "the judges would do well to consider this fine piece of film writing." Regardless, "As a piece of music in its own right the group of pieces works handsomely ... There's an urgency and tension throughout that makes it difficult to ignore."