Tangerine Dream scored director Michael Mann's film debut, Thief (released as "Violent Streets" outside of the U.S. market), adding their patented pulses, blips and whooshes to the film's highly stylized visual scenes. While TD's electronic music is a natural fit for soundtracks, it doesn't bring out the best in the band; for the most part, this soundtrack contains swatches of a larger canvas, building up a small head of steam in the span of four or five minutes but not raising the musical discussion above the level of mere mechanical chitchat. Most of the songs follow a set pattern, with Chris Franke slurring his sequencers under a thin fog of synthesizers, topped by a piercing and pithy melody. An engaging melody on "Beach Theme" makes it one of the album's better tracks, while "Trap Feeling" has a delicacy that compares favorably to Brian Eno's Music for Films…

Nine Inch Nails multihyphenates Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross scored a pair of Oscar nominations on Monday, for the score of David Fincher’s Mank, the 1930s-set biopic about Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, available on Netflix; and Pixar’s jazz-inspired animated film Soul, a nomination that they share with Jon Batiste.