Movies with music written by Alexandre Desplat

Part mystery investigation, part mismatched buddy film, and part condemnation of inhumane attitudes in 1950s Ireland and 1980s Washington, Philomena falls into the category of "too unbelievable to be fiction." Faithfully based on the true story tol...

The older he has gotten, the more offbeat his films have become. Now, to be clear, Wes Anderson has never been a conventional filmmaker. His movies have always appealed more to niche audiences than mainstream ones. (My favorite of his oeuvre, ...

For Malcolm Washington, The Piano Lesson was something of a family affair. For his directorial debut, the filmmaker recruited his brother, John David Washington, to play the lead, while his father, Denzel, produced. The screenplay, which Malcolm c...

A Prophet (Un prophète in its home tongue) is director Jacques Audiard's gangster-themed twist on the rags-to-riches story. Although it's a genre staple to present the story of an innocent corrupted by the criminal world and rising to a position ...

With The Queen, Stephen Frears has at least two items on his agenda: to humanize the head of the British monarchy while at the same time indicating how far removed she has become from the concerns of her subjects. He also poses questions about the...

It has been nearly a year since I first saw Read My Lips, and the taste of the film still lingers. Time may leech away the specifics, but the overall impression remains. So it is with many great films. By far, the most impressive French film I s...

The summer of 2012 was dismal for animated fare but, with releases like Frankenweenie, Wreck-It Ralph, and Rise of the Guardians, things have taken a turn for the better during the autumn. This movie, which is targeted at older children (rather tha...

When Rust and Bone tells a story of a woman's recovery from a devastating injury, it hits all the right notes, traveling a path that is poignant without being mawkish and triumphant without being saccharine. However, when it chronicles the life of...

To the extent that there’s a difference between “big screen cartoons” and “animated features,” The Secret Life of Pets 2 comes closer to the former than the latter on the spectrum of non-live-action motion picture entertainment. The ...

About 20 minutes into The Secret Life of Pets, an entertaining but inconsequential animated movie, I was struck by a powerful feeling of déjà vu. It didn’t take long for me to ascertain the cause. The Secret of Pets is pretty much...