Movies with cinematographer Dante Spinotti

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...

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...

It has been four years since the events depicted in Michael Mann's The Insider occurred. Actually, to be precise, it has been four years since some of them occurred. In the interests of drama, a certain amount of "fictionalization" has taken plac...

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...

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...

After the Sunset is a mess, but it's a breezy, fun mess. No one is ever going to mistake this for great art, but it has a charismatic cast, moves with an effortless pace, and, in the end, almost makes you forget that it doesn't do anything memorab...

Back in mid-'90s, director Curtis Hanson was known as a B-list filmmaker - someone who could cull a fair amount of tension out of workmanlike stories such as The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The River Wild. All of that changed in 1997, however, ...

Nell, Jodie Foster's return to dramatic acting following a flirtation with Maverick's action-comedy, is an entirely human movie. In this lush, green world of rolling hills and crystal pools, technology is an unwelcome intruder; civilization, a thr...

Flash of Genius is based on the real-life story of engineer Bob Kearns, who is credited with inventing the intermittent windshield wiper. The movie, which recounts the period beginning with the invention and continuing through a lawsuit against Fo...