Director Sam Mendes's much-anticipated follow-up to his Academy Award^®-winning American Beauty found him exploring the period gangster film--but with a moral fiber and undercurrent of family tragedy familiar from his Oscar^® triumph. As he did with Beauty, Mendes again wisely entrusts the film's music to Tom Newman, a composer with an instinctive knack for getting inside a film's characters via innovative and often orthodox methods. As many of Newman's preceding scores have been rhythmically driven and rife with improvisation-driven experimentalism, its good to hear his equally distinctive writing for orchestra largely take center stage here again. But Newman's inquisitive musical instincts can't be denied, and his melancholy string writing is leavened first with subtle uilleann pipe flourishes that echo the characters' Irish-American roots, then with savory, yet ever-restrained touches of his own ethnic-defying instrumental color and rhythmic accents. It's another moody and introspective gem, seasoned with some lively period jazz (courtesy of the Charleston Chasers, Fletcher Henderson and his Orchestra, and Chicago Rhythm Kings) and a warm, final surprise: a duet of John M. Williams's autumnal title track performed by none other than stars Tom Hanks and Paul Newman. --Jerry McCulley

Original soundtrack to the 2011 motion picture composed by Thomas Newman. The Iron Lady tells the compelling story of Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep), a woman who smashed through the barriers of gender and class to be heard in a male- dominated world. The story concerns power, the price that is paid for power, and is a surprising and intimate portrait of an extraordinary and complex woman. Best known for his many film scores, Thomas Newman is one of the more respected and recognized composers for modern film. He has scored over fifty feature films in a career which spans nearly three decades. Newman has received a total of ten Academy Award nominations on such diverse scores as Road To Perdition, Finding Nemo, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events and Steven Soderbergh's The Good German. He has won two Grammy Awards, an Emmy and has been nominated for a Golden Globe.

Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, and Jennifer Connelly star in the latest work from Oscar-nominated writer/director Todd Field. Based on the novel by Tom Perrotta ("Election"), "Little Children" centers on a handful of individuals whose lives intersect on the playgrounds, in town pools, and on the streets of their small community in surprising and potentially dangerous ways. Features music from Academy Award nominee Thomas Newman, whose extensive work in film and television brings a unique orchestral style to the film's score.

The characters of Daniel Handler's popular children's book series spring to life in this playfully macabre screen adaptation from director Brad Silberling. Contemporary scoring master Thomas Newman may launch the musical proceedings with the brief, Disney-esque flourish of "The Bad Beginning," but the sound of a needle being brusquely dragged across that record brings us to the composer's true intent: a teasing romp through occasionally dark, rhythmically charged musical corners. Employing his patent take on post-modern impressionism to a greater degree than he did in Finding Nemo, Newman gives a decidedly contemporary spin to the oft-cliched concept of children's music. His score is a an inviting fusion of his tense, ever-inventive, ensemble studio concoctions and a Euro-Goth sensibility inspired by the film's visual sense. Alternately bright and brooding, with a surprise at nearly every turn (not the least of which is "Loverly Spring," a full reprise of the score's creepily saccharine opening song), Newman's score is yet another tribute to his restless, seemingly boundless creativity. --Jerry McCulley