Movies with music written by Danny Elfman

The box office performance of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman assured there would be sequel but Burton’s desire for greater creative control caused the production of Batman Returns to linger in development longer than Warner Brothers preferred. In ad...

If all you’re looking for out of a movie is Adam Driver running around in a jungle shooting dinosaurs while protecting a young girl, 65 delivers in spades. If you’re hoping for something more complex, either in terms of character development, ...

Gene Siskel infamously gave Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure a zero-star review, stating “Obviously, Pee-Wee is tolerable only in Pee-Wee doses…” Although that seems unnecessarily harsh, especially in retrospect (now that the film is commonly viewe...

Spoiler Note: The review is “spoiler lite” with nothing beyond what has been shown in the trailer and other officially sanctioned pre-release material. However, although I don’t reveal any cameos that are in the film, I mention some that are...

For roughly its first third, Joe Wright’s The Woman in the Window, based on the best-selling novel by A.J. Finn, feels like a quasi-remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. It then shifts gears and enters Gaslight/Witness to Murder territ...

For Rodney Dangerfield, the stand-up comedian whose catchphrase was “I don’t get no respect,” Back to School provided an opportunity to get more than his share of praise and adulation. The crowd-pleasing comedy grossed $91M, making it th...

If I used words like “tiresome” and “lazy” to describe this pointless remake/reboot, it wouldn’t be sufficient to express the apathy I feel for Columbia Pictures’ sad attempt to exhume a franchise that was pronounced dead by the ti...

Dumbo is a perfectly adequate family film. While that may seem like damning with faint praise, keep in mind that this movie was never considered to be among Disney’s 2019 big guns. It fills a niche and does so nicely with a style and approac...

The 1966 animated TV Christmas special, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” is as perfect an adaptation of the Dr. Seuss book as one is likely to find. Featuring an iconic vocal performance by Boris Karloff (doing double-duty as the narrator...

Spoiler alert: There’s a spoiler in paragraph #4. Is it a big deal? Depends on how deeply you’re invested in these characters and whether you’ve read the books. It’s there but it won’t ruin the movie if you inadvertently read it. Alt...