The latest screen version of Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby comes complete with a score by Rachel Portman, who won an Oscar for her work on the same director's Emma a few years back. It's certainly got an all-star cast, with Jim Broadbent, Alan Cumming, Nathan Lane and Christopher Plummer among the famous faces, but only received a very limited theatrical release just towards the end of 2002 in a vain attempt to get a few Oscar nominations.

Trouble with the score is that you could just about have hummed it without having ever listened to it. It's the bog standard Portman fare of strings and woodwind playing sprightly, pleasant tunes and you could alternate it with any one of twenty other Portman scores without noticing the difference. Lots of composers have signature styles that means you can always recognise their scores, but at least you can usually tell one score apart from the rest, but not so with Portman. Everything's interchangeable, no film gets a unique voice of its own, and to be honest it's become very tiresome now. You may just as well listen to Chocolat or The Cider House Rules again as go out and get Nicholas Nickleby, it's so similar.

Just as with those others, there's a lovely theme which certainly can't be faulted, but it's just Portman on autopilot. And just as with the others, there are moments of darker material, but once again it's standard stuff. Nicholas Nickleby is no worse than other Portman scores, it's just so similar as to render it redundant. I honestly think it's time she downed tools and refused to write scores like this any more: she's shown she can do it, we know she can do it, time to move on now.

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