Search for Marco Beltrami

Hampton Fancher's The Minus Man is a methodical, chilling excursion into the mind of a serial killer. And, like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, it seeks to explore, not to exploit. Those on a quest for complete understanding won't find it her...

It's increasingly unusual that a thriller can claim to maintain its intensity for the entirety of its running length. No Escape is masterful at keeping the stakes high without confounding our so-called "suspension of disbelief." Unlike ...

The November Man feels like just about every B-grade spy thriller that has ever been committed to the silver screen. With a slipshod narrative that could be mistaken for diluted Ludlum, Deighton, or Le Carre, The November Man provides us with an op...

The Omen is regarded as a horror classic, although I have never been able to figure out why Richard Donner's second-rate exploitation flick has been accorded such a lofty status. Since the 2006 re-make is almost identical to its predecessor (even ...

Remember how Liam Neeson made it an annual tradition to release a cheesy action/thriller every January or February? Well, Neeson appears to have retired from that business leaving the door wide open for Gerard Butler to step through. Butler has th...

My review of John Krasinski’s 2018 A Quiet Place called the movie “a superb exercise in understated terror that puts to shame ‘horror’ films that rely on jump scares and cheap theatrics.” It was one of the best films of the year and ...

For movies like A Quiet Place – science fiction-based horror films that aren’t obsessed with appealing to the Blumhouse demographic – tone and atmosphere are the most critical production aspects. This is something Ridley Scott understood...

Red Eye belongs to the genre in which a director attempts to sustain a heightened level of suspense for long enough that the audience will not notice how incredibly stupid the screenplay is. Alfred Hitchcock was a master at this - although some of...

The last time Nicolas Cage bared his fangs – in 1988’s Vampire’s Kiss – his performance was widely criticized (and, in some circles, praised) for being outlandishly campy. Now, some 35 years later, Cage has channeled the same zany zeitgeis...

Repo Men feels like it was cobbled together using pieces of other, often better motion pictures. I could provide a list of titles but it would be more comprehensive simply to state that if a movie is set on a less-than-optimistic future Earth, some...