Movies with cinematographer Dante Spinotti

Over the past couple of years, Marvel Studios has ridden the crest of an incredible wave, culminating in the 2018 one-two punch of Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War. A drop-off was perhaps inevitable but I doubt anyone expected it to be ...

Here’s a link to my original review of Heat, published in December 1995.At the time of its 1995 release, Heat was heralded primarily as offering the first on-screen pairing of legends Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. Although the two had shared t...

These days, it seems damn near everything is based on a comic book, and not all the resultant cinematic material is worth the effort taken to adapt it. Certainly, Hercules is a big-budget misfire of a sizeable order, a visually busy but emotionall...

Whether suffused with tension or laced with humor, the heist movie has enjoyed enduring appeal since the heyday of film noir. Good heist movies proceed according to an established template that includes meticulous attention to the details of the sc...

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is fantasy-lite. With its PG rating and aversion to anything shocking or overly grotesque, it's the bastard stepchild of The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. A dull, meandering storyline an...

There's something almost old-fashioned about Michael Mann's Public Enemies, a mostly factual re-telling of the descent and death of John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), one of the 1930s most infamous bank robbers. More drama than thriller, the movie does...

There is so little wrong with this film that I'll get the incidental negatives out of the way first. The introductory moments are somewhat confusing, and it takes about fifteen or twenty minutes to get the characters and situations straight. Made...

Crooked cops. The mystery and allure of Hollywood in the '50s. Death, double-crossing, and secret alliances. Paparazzi waiting to get that one breakthrough picture. These are just some of the elements that make Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confiden...

To succeed, Deception requires viewers to be both inattentive and stupid. There's not a twist in this flimsy and moth-eaten plot that isn't both contrived and transparent and not a character who hasn't been hopelessly manipulated by the needs of th...

For X-Men viewers, this is probably as straightforward as it gets: if you liked the first two, you're likely to appreciate the third. X-Men: The Last Stand isn't as taut or satisfying as X-Men 2, but it's better constructed and better paced than t...