Movies with music written by James Newton Howard

While watching Liar Liar, it occurred to me that the chief problem with this film is that it has a script. If Jim Carrey had been unleashed without such silly, incidental constraints as plot and dialogue, who knows where things might have gone? A...

The Lookout is an effective little thriller that almost works from taut beginning to unspectacular end. The premise is interesting and the story is developed in such a way that the viewer is engaged throughout. The opening scene hooks us and the ...

Edward Zwick is probably best known for his work on television. Along with Marshall Herkovitz, he was a driving force behind two long-running TV series (thirtySomething and Once and Again). He was also an important contributor to many others (inc...

Mad Money is a comedy caper where the caper's not interesting and the comedy's not funny. Take away those elements and all that's left is a tepid female buddy movie and, like its male counterparts, we've had enough of those to choke a critic. It'...

Maleficent might best be described as an alternate universe re-imagination of Sleeping Beauty. Taking a page from Wicked (the stage show that presents Oz from the witches' perspective), Linda Woolverton's screenplay presents an inverted version of ...

When it comes to motion pictures, there are essentially two kinds of thrillers: visceral thrillers, which rely on action to generate tension and excitement, and intellectual thrillers, which burn more slowly but are often more satisfying in the end...

My Best Friend's Wedding is the estrogen alternative to the vast quantity of testosterone being pumped out by the other major June releases: Con Air, Speed 2, Batman and Robin, and Face/Off. As the summer's centerpiece romantic comedy, My Best ...

News of the World, based on the 2016 novel by Paulette Jiles, is a road trip Western where the genre serves less as the focus than as a backdrop to the relationship between the paternalistic Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks) and the 10-y...

Nightcrawler is a dark and cynical movie for a nihilistic age. It's tense and at times uncomfortable, perhaps because the viewer recognizes that, although the story is fiction, there's a lot of truth in what it has to say about local news and the i...

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is a miscalculation of Magic Kingdom-sized proportions. Designed for and targeted at prepubescent girls, the holiday-themed fantasy adventure drowns in CGI, underdeveloped characters, and a plot utterly devoi...