Criterion Channel Descends Into the Void With a Four-Film Trent Reznor Tribute

Criterion Channel is doing something very up my alley next month: a mini-tribute to Trent Reznor that traces how his sound has seeped into movies over the last three decades. It is a tight four-film lineup, not a completist box set, but it hits the right notes and shows the range from snarling 90s chaos to cool, digital paranoia to tender horror. Yes, it is curated. Yes, it looks great.

"Few musicians have reshaped the sonic texture of contemporary cinema as profoundly as Trent Reznor, whose atmospheric, synth-driven soundtracks—often composed in collaboration with Atticus Ross—bristle with unease and eerie beauty. With his early contributions to Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and David Lynch's Lost Highway, the Nine Inch Nails mastermind channeled the dissonance of industrial rock into intense aural collages of dread and desire, while his celebrated score for The Social Network lent an undercurrent of ambient ominousness to David Fincher's chronicle of corporate betrayal. In Luca Guadagnino's Bones and All, Reznor's music conveys tenderness and terror in the same breath, continuing a career-long exploration of how sound can embody even the most ambiguous emotional states."

The lineup

• Natural Born Killers (1994) - Reznor produced the soundtrack while he was on Nine Inch Nails' Self Destruct Tour. It is a heady mix (Leonard Cohen, Cowboy Junkies, and more), with NIN contributing three tracks, including the standout 'Burn'.
• Lost Highway (1997) - Reznor also produced this one for David Lynch. Angelo Badalamenti's score is the spine, but Reznor threads in darker textures and drops the NIN single 'The Perfect Drug'.
• The Social Network (2010) - The watershed collaboration with Atticus Ross that redefined the modern studio thriller score and won the Oscar for Best Original Score. Still one of the decade's (and honestly, the century's) best.
• Bones and All (2022) - Reznor and Ross pivot to something more intimate and unsettling at once, scoring Luca Guadagnino's cannibal romance with equal parts tenderness and dread. Note: this title will stream in the United States only.

And no, this is not some stealth promo for Tron: Ares. Criterion is keeping the focus where it should be.

If you have seen all four, this is still a fun side-by-side on how Reznor's approach evolved: mixtape-as-nightmare in the 90s, then the cool, digital hum that made The Social Network feel dangerous, then the strange, bruised heart of Bones and All. I will be first in line for another spin of The Social Network, but the Natural Born Killers and Lost Highway soundtracks remain fascinating early snapshots of how he started bending cinema to his frequency.