Orphan turned opportunist Becky Sharp made her lusty debut in the pages of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1847 novel Vanity Fair. Well, the bitch is back. And Reese Witherspoon, sporting a credible British accent, gives Becky some of the hard steel of her career-best role as Tracy Flick in 1999's Election. This is all to the good. What rankles is how the Reese shine that sold Legally Blonde and Sweet Home Alabama also seeps into the mix. It's one thing to understand Becky — do we have to love her, too? The fault here may lie with Indian director Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding), who understandably expands on the novel's India themes but insists on reshaping Becky as a "modern woman." The strain shows. There are pleasures in the script, co-written by Gosford Park's Julian Fellowes. The snob George Osborne (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) says of Becky, "I had thought she was a social climber — I can see now she's a mountaineer." And in small roles, Gabriel Byrne and Eileen Atkins make huge impressions. But in an effort to blend Thackeray and Sex and the City, Vanity Fair ends up nowhere.

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”