Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackery's mid-19th-century meditation on the boundaries of class and gender gets a smartly sympathetic remake via Indian director Mira Nair and Reese Witherspoon, who imbues the story's social-climbing Becky Sharp with some of the same spunky spirit the actress brought toLegally Blonde's equally ambitious Elle. Composer Mychael Danna furthers that sense of era-bridging drama with an orchestral score that sets the story's time and place via effective pastiches of Schubert and Beethoven (that's Danna himself channeling a little Ludwig van on the evocative solo piano passages "Andante" and "Adagio"), yet often fuses them seamlessly with a modern sensibility that helps story's contemporary parallels resonate all the more. The soundtracks four songs revolve around poles of Romantic-era evocations (Danna's stately adaptations of Lord Byron's sonnet "She Walks in Beauty" and the standard "Great Adventurer") and the lively East Asian rhythms of  Hakim's "El Salaam" and Mahadevan/Sharma's sprightly duet, "Gori Re." But Danna's masterful infusion of 19th century classical Romanticism with the dry, postmodern instincts of the 21st are the score's most compelling achievements, music that argues that while times and mores have changed, the human spirit remains as stubborn as ever.--Jerry McCulley