Movies with music written by Mychael Danna

Fracture is refreshingly different from the average mystery thriller in that it does not bombard the audience with "shocking" twists and "surprise" turns. This is a good thing, since those kinds of gimmicky plot elements more often than not derail...

Every actor or actress has his or her pet project - something they put their whole heart and soul into getting on the screen. For some, especially those who flirt only briefly (or not at all) with the spotlight of public adulation, this can be...

To date, no motion picture has adequately captured the soaring highs and devastating lows associated with a long distance relationship, but Going the Distance comes as close as any movie has. Nannette Burstein's feature gets many of the highlights...

The Good Dinosaur, although an adequate family film, lacks qualities that have made many of Pixar’s previous productions classics. Less a major animated effort than a late-autumn “filler”, the movie offers enough to enthrall childre...

Perceptive is the best single word I can come up with to describe The Ice Storm, Ang Lee's near-masterpiece that deconstructs the American family. For, although the film is provocative, entertaining, and impeccably crafted, its greatest streng...

If I was a teacher and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was a student's paper, I would give it an "incomplete." After all, how can one assess a project whose nature was irrevocably altered when the lead actor died? Whatever vision director Ter...

Robert Frost famously wrote, "Good fences make good neighbors," and that's one of the first phrases that comes to mind while watching Lakeview Terrace, the latest thriller from Neil LaBute. LaBute began his filmmaking career with the scathing In...

Life of Pi is a curious juxtaposition of the mundane and the majestic; a film that strives for something grander than what it perhaps achieves. At times, the simple story - one of spirituality and survival - exudes a quiet, hypnotic power, but ther...

It takes a deft hand to fashion a feel-good movie with plenty of laughs and an upbeat ending out of a story that includes drug addiction, a suicide attempt, a death, Nietzsche, and Proust. Despite treading through a minefield of tone shifts, co-di...

The Man Who Invented Christmas conflates the biography of Charles Dickens (at least until 1843) with the events of one of his seminal works, A Christmas Carol. Watching the film leads one to the conclusion that, although the story might have w...