Movies with music written by Alexandre Desplat

The Boys in the Boat is an old-fashioned, uplifting story about the triumph of underdogs. The film radiates the same level of classiness often associated with its director, George Clooney. Sentimental without being saccharine, this based-on-histor...

It takes about ten seconds to identify Asteroid City as a “Wes Anderson movie” and that’s arguably the movie’s Achilles Heel. Anderson’s style and approach have become so baked-into his projects that they threaten to overwhelm the materi...

The mention of Pinocchio generally stirs up memories of the 1940 Disney animated feature, which (at the time) was the greatly anticipated follow-up to 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Today, Disney’s Pinocchio is regarded as one of the...

While watching The Outfit, a new film from director Graham Moore, I was reminded of the classic Sleuth – not in terms of specific plot points but in the way the film employs misdirection to increase the level of suspense, and also in the use of ...

It’s difficult to express how refreshing it is to encounter a dystopian film that hasn’t been developed for the YA market. Although flavored at times by its twin inspirations Gravity and The Revenant, The Midnight Sky maintains its own uni...

Little Women is a like Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice – the story is so well-known (and well-loved) that any new motion picture adaptation becomes more about screenwriting choices (what’s left in and what’s taken out) and performances. C...

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 ...

Spoilers for those who don’t know much about history.Operating Finale is an historically-based thriller that follows a group of Nazi hunters as they identify, stalk, capture, and debrief Adolf Eichmann (Ben Kingsley) in Argentina during 196...

With a running length of 30 or 40 minutes, Isle of Dogs might have been brilliant. Unfortunately, this concept, although suitable for a short, is too thin for a full animated feature. Wes Anderson’s sly humor, like the film, wears out its we...

Although Guillermo del Toro was never given the opportunity to bring his vision of The Hobbit to the screen, movie-goers over the years have not been deprived of his brand of horror-tinged fantasy. With his latest, the story is a variation on ...