Movies with music written by John Ottman

The "usual suspects" are five men: Dean Keaton (Gabriel Byrne), an ex-cop-turned-crook who's known for his steely demeanor and nerves of iron; Michael McManus (Stephen Baldwin), a psycho entry man; Todd Hockney (Kevin Pollak), a hardware specialis...

At the end of Superman II, the producers promised "Coming Soon: Superman III." It has taken 26 years for that promise to be fulfilled. To be sure, there were movies in the 1980s called Superman III and Superman IV, but those were bad jokes masquera...

X-Men: Days of Future Past doesn't feel like a superhero movie, at least not in a traditional sense. There are action scenes but many are suffused with a sense of futility. Battles turn into massacres with the "good guys" on the wrong side of the c...

If there’s an obstacle to the potential box office success of X-Men: Apocalypse, it’s the growing sense of superhero movie fatigue. Counting Deadpool, this is the fourth superhero movie to reach screens in the last three-plus months. With...

The problem with X2 is essentially the same one that plagued X-Men: too many characters, resulting in too little screen time for each one. X2 may be the most ambitious superhero motion picture to date, but it doesn't work quite as well as Spider-...

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is the breezy directorial debut of Lethal Weapon screenwriter Shane Black. Black knows film noir inside and out, because he uses the basic template here. He jazzes things up by employing an aware and self-deprecating narrator ...

Cellular is a nearly perfectly executed "high concept" thriller, that, like Speed and Phone Booth, uses a gimmicky setup but is paced so relentlessly that you don't have time to dwell upon the obvious implausibility of the situation. (It should be...

Going into this film, I wondered whether the filmmakers would succeed at generating tension out of an event whose outcome is so well-known. Even those with only a rudimentary knowledge of history are aware that Hitler did not die as the result of ...

Jack the Giant Slayer is an enjoyable fantasy/adventure whose magic is partially undermined by marginal 3-D. Once again, the ugliest aspects of this format rear their heads: dim and fuzzy images, lackluster colors, and poor definition. Everything i...

For those familiar with director Shane Black’s oeuvre, The Nice Guys is closer to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang than Iron Man 3. Featuring the same blend of high octane action and Tarantino-esque humor as Black’s 2005 debut, The Nice Guys doubles as a come...