Movies with music written by Elmer Bernstein

An astonishing motion picture by any standards, To Kill a Mockingbird only failed to win a Best Picture Oscar because it was in the running against Lawrence of Arabia. The minimalist might call this a "courtroom drama", but that would be selling t...

It's New York City in the 1870s, a society ruled by expectations and propriety, where a hint of immorality can bring scandal and ruin. This is an America every bit as Victorian as her contemporary England. Into this world arrives Countess Ellen O...

Welcome to the world of "Father Knows Best", white picket fences, and brilliant fall colors. Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven takes us to Hartford, Connecticut, circa 1957. However, unlike most traditional period piece dramas, the intention here isn'...

Although the 1980s were not kind to most traditional monsters - vampires, mummies, gargoyles, and the like - the first two years of the decade offered three prominent werewolf movies. The first to reach the screen was Joe Dante's The Howling, whic...

If nothing else, The Black Cauldron has become the most infamous of all of Disney's animated motion pictures. When it was first released in the summer of 1985, it was to have re- invigorated Disney' moribund animated division, which had produce...

It has been several years since I've read a book by John Grisham (I believe the last one was The Client). After three or four of Grisham's novels, I grew tired of the predictable repetitiveness and contrived suspense of the narratives. As a resul...

Airplane! has not aged well. The fine wine hasn't turned into vinegar but it's not as pleasant to the palate as it once was. Viewed more than 25 years after its initial release, Airplane! retains the capacity to tickle the funny bone, but someone u...

It seems that in a period detective story, it's a prerequisite for the main character to narrate the proceedings. In Devil in a Blue Dress, writer/director Carl Franklin apparently intended this conceit as a tribute to the Dashiell Hammett/Raymond...

Twilight may end up being the most disappointing film of 1998. It certainly holds that distinction to date, but I'm aware that there are ten months left in the year. And let me emphasize that by "disappointing," I mean something that falls drasti...