The Lake House

The first five tracks on the soundtrack to this Sandra Bullock/Keanu Reeves romantic drama are wonderfully wistful songs. The first, Paul McCartney's "This Never Happened Before" from his 2005 album Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, sets the tone. The low-key mood is then picked up by new romantic souls like the Clientele (the languidly forlorn "(I Can't Seem to) Make You Mine") and Eels (the fiddle-accented ballad "Ant Farm"), and classic songwriters Nick Drake (with 1969's "Time Has Told Me") and Carole King (1971's "It's Too Late"). The rest of the album is made up of Rachel Portman's intimately romantic score. Portman makes good use of melody lines driven sometimes by a piano ("Mailbox") and sometimes an acoustic guitar ("Tell Me More"), while also ensuring that the orchestra never threatens to overwhelm them. And when strings dominate, they never feel rote ("Sunsets"). The music isn't in-your-face sad but tinged with a sense of very adult melancholy. Whoever thought that one day we'd say that of something attached to a Keanu Reeves movie? --Elisabeth Vincentelli