Search for Michael Kamen

Serene. Beautiful. Untouchable. All of those words can be used to describe the subject of Leonardo Da Vinci's best-known painting, "The Mona Lisa." And, while almost everyone knows what she looks like, no one knows her story. Her life is a bla...

Die Hard represents the class of modern action pictures and the standard by which they must be judged. Few films falling into the "mindless entertainment" genre have as much going for them as this movie. Not only is it a thrill-a-minute ride, but...

It would be easy to lump Lethal Weapon into the vast scrapyard of mismatched buddy cop movies, but such a facile classification would do Richard Donner's 1987 thriller a disservice. This is one of the best of the subgenre, an action-packed movie t...

Over the past few years, as studios like Disney, Dreamworks, and Fox have worked to revive motion picture animation, Warner Brothers has remained mired in the lackluster morass that nearly killed animation during the '80s. The distributor's big ef...

It's rare that the sequel to a good movie lives up to expectations. Such is the case with Die Hard 2, the somewhat-muddled but still entertaining return of Bruce Willis' John McClane. Fortunately, the original Die Hard was good enough that there'...

Terry Gilliam's Brazil is one of those films whose enduring reputation is based at least in part on events surrounding its stormy distribution history. Taken at face value, Brazil is a stinging, Strangelovian satire of the power of the bureaucracy...

Since 1992, when Lethal Weapon 3 became an undisputed box office hit, there has been talk about a follow-up. With the possible exception of the still-unconfirmed Die Hard 4, Lethal Weapon 4 has been the subject of more (often inaccurate) rumors th...

By 1989 and the release of Licence to Kill, James Bond had a lot of competition in the action genre. With so many higher-profile contenders (like Batman) in the arena, 007's popularity hit an all-time low. Audiences seemed less inclined to see th...

For Marvel Enterprises, the arrival of X-Men on the big screen represents the culmination of efforts that stretch back more than 20 years. For that long, Marvel has been trying to get one of their properties - Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, X-Men,...

When The American President was released, many knowledgeable movie-goers commented how the sentimentality of its "feel good" storyline recalled the work of director Frank Capra. Now, with Mr. Holland's Opus, another Capra-esque motion picture has ...