Movies with music written by Christophe Beck

The second Shazam! movie, sequel to the 2019 modest success, is an undercooked casserole of cliched narrative elements, underdeveloped characters, juvenile humor, and a deus ex machina cameo. It embodies all that’s bad about modern superhero mov...

It’s fair to say that the third Ant-Man movie is the most ambitious of the trio. It’s also unlike most superhero movies, taking the storyline into uncanny and mostly unexplored (at least in the MCU) directions. There are glimpses of potential ...

As a comedic satire of gaming and an offbeat romantic comedy, Free Guy is amiable and entertaining, if a little too long (an unfortunately common problem among big-budget movies in the 2010s and 2020s). When it comes to the film’s “deeper�...

For many years, Disney resisted the urge to craft big-budget sequels to popular animated films. During the “second wave” years of the 1990s, a cottage industry was born whereby cut-rate direct-to-home video follow-ups were made but the stu...

Over the past couple of years, Marvel Studios has ridden the crest of an incredible wave, culminating in the 2018 one-two punch of Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War. A drop-off was perhaps inevitable but I doubt anyone expected it to be ...

You don’t have to look too far or to deep to find the similarities among writer/director Andrew Niccol’s three science fiction films (I’m ignoring The Host, which is more Stephanie Meyer than Niccol). Like Gattaca and In Time, Anon boas...

This character study compensates for certain narrative hiccups and a bland sense of time and place by offering an effective performance by Ben Kingsley to go along with a story that asks difficult questions and goes to places many similar film...

As counter-intuitive as it might sound, chaos only works in a movie when it is carefully controlled and focused. Tarantino is one of several masters of this technique and there’s a sense during the course of Gringo that director Nash Edgerton...

American Made is loosely – very, very loosely – based on true events. Ultimately, however, little of the real Barry Seal’s life has made it into the film, which is used by director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Edge of Tomorrow) and ...

Nostalgia - many movies (especially sequels to long-lasting franchises) trade in it to one degree or another. Few films, however, rely on its impact as strongly as The Peanuts Movie, the first big-screen outing for Charlie Brown & friends since 1...