In advance of next Sunday's premiere of the final season of The Wire, the Wall Street Journal's Lauren Mechling examines the series playwright Tony Kushner calls his "favorite TV show." And, he admits, "I watch TV a lot."

Regular visitors to Nonesuch.com may notice some changes we've made to the site. In addition to a new look we've given to the home page, we've added a few new features that will hopefully make your experience here a richer and more interesting one. Here are some of the things you'll find at Nonesuch.com.

Happy holidays from everyone at Nonesuch Records. As we look forward to another incredible year of music in 2008, starting with the first-ever soundtrack from the HBO series The Wire on January 8, we thought we'd celebrate the close of 2007 with a look back at all the great music that came from Nonesuch artists this year. Here they are, the 2007 Nonesuch Records releases, from the most recent, two highly acclaimed soundtracks from what many critics are calling the year's best films, Sweeney Todd and There Will Be Blood (both albums now available in the new Nonesuch Store), to the record that kicked the year off with a rocking good start, Caetano Veloso's Cê.

There Will Be Blood is "one of the most wholly original American movies ever made," writes TIME magazine's Richard Schickel in his review of the film. He calls Daniel Day-Lewis's performance "genius (and I use that word advisedly)," and points in particular to the film's "astonishing" last scene as an example of the actor's unparalleled performance. The film's ending, Schickel writes, "contains what I—resistant as I am to superlatives—consider to be the most explosive and unforgettable 10 or 15 minutes of screen acting I have ever witnessed."

"American cinema produced one flat-out masterpiece this year—Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood," says CNN's Tom Charity, who also calls the film "extraordinary" in his review of the year on screen. The writer was less charitable with some of the year's other artistic efforts, though he does compliment The Wire, proposing that most of the attempts at high-art movies in 2007 "don't measure up to the best TV series: The Wire, Deadwood, and The Sopranos, for example."

The Boston Herald's James Verniere writes that the year's best movie music was Jonny Greenwood's "entire, diabolically mesmerizing score for There Will Be Blood." In a separate article, he names the "insanely brilliant" film among the year's best as well.

Kronos Quartet's recording of Henryk Górecki's String Quartet No. 3 (" ... songs are sung") tops New Jersey Star-Ledger staff writer Bradley Bambarger's list of the best classical recordings of 2007. Bambarger calls the piece "an intense, 50-minute match for the Polish composer's global '90s hit 'Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,' [Symphony No. 3]," which was recorded by Dawn Upshaw and the London Sinfonietta.

Of all the efforts at big-scale movie storytelling over the past several months, writes J. Hoberman in the Village Voice, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is "the one that packs the strongest movie-movie wallop." He continues: "This is truly a work of symphonic aspirations and masterful execution. Anderson's superb filmmaking is complemented throughout by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood's excellent score—at once modernist and rhapsodic, full of discordant excitements, outer-space siren trills, and the rumble of distant thunder ... There's hardly a dull moment."

With 2008 just about to get under way, and a whole new year in music still waiting to unfold, The Magnetic Fields' upcoming release, Distortion, tops Los Angeles Times staff writer Todd Martens' list of what to look forward to straightaway. The album is set for release on Nonesuch January 15.

MTV's Kurt Loder says that Jonny Greenwood's score for There Will Be Blood is among the "wonderful" parts of Paul Thomas Anderson's new film. Loder calls Anderson's decision to hire Greenwood an "audacious" one, and one that paid off, with the end result an outstanding work independent of the film for which it was written: "The music is an orchestral wash of beautifully harmonized melodies spiked with thoroughly modern dissonance, and while it's a jarring accompaniment for some of the imagery, it stands on its own as a series of superbly astringent compositions."

New York Times film critics Manohla Dargis and Stephen Holden both rate Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood at the top of their lists of favorite films of the year. Dargis writes that it was one of the two films of 2007 that "matter most to me, that dug in the deepest and rearranged my own givens ... that shook up my world in the best possible way." And Holden compares There Will Be Blood to three classic American films, while recognizing that the director has created something entirely new as well. Anderson's film, Holden writes, "suggests a fusion of East of Eden, Giant, and Citizen Kane with the Hollywood finery ripped to shreds."

"Spellbinding" says CBS Sunday Morning's film critic David Edelstein of Tim Burton's film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. "Sondheim, our greatest living theatrical composer and lyricist," Edelstein says, "has never been so deliciously served."