• Composed by Thomas Newman

Based on an intelligence operation performed late in WWII by the British to fool the Germans into thinking they were planning to invade Greece (rather than Sicily) – with a fictional love triangle thrown in for good measure – John Madden’s Operation Mincemeat has attracted reasonable reviews and offered the director to re-team with his Best Marigold Hotel composer Thomas Newman. I was not alone in thinking for a long time that Newman was one of the finest film composers of his generation, tackling serious dramas with great skill and no shortage of flair for year after year, before flexing his muscles on a wider range of projects as time went by – and then seemingly losing interest in painting with the kind of broad strokes that drew so many towards him, concentrating in recent years very much more on much more low-key music, with the quirks that were always such a big part of his sound relegated somewhat to sounding like a bag of tricks being opened a few too many times. He is – of course – still the same extraordinarily gifted composer that he always was, and so there are usually some moments within scores where that old magic is present; sadly Operation Mincemeat is not the score that sees them coming back and taking over as the prevalent element. It is all impeccably done in terms of being a singular musical vision with some dramatic substance behind it; and it’s a sound that has always been present in his writing, but perhaps the one sound in there that never seemed likely to become the dominant one.