Movies with music written by Rob Simonsen

Get ready for a deep dive into nostalgia. Ghostbusters: Afterlife, although boasting a next generation of Ghostbusters, works best for those who have seen (and at least somewhat remember) the original two Ivan Reitman films from the ‘80s. Althou...

Here’s a piece of advice: don’t watch a trailer for Gifted prior to seeing the film. This warning has nothing to do with spoilers; the trailer makes the movie seem like a cloying, paint-by-numbers story that no one in their right mind would...

Just call it Grumpy Old Crooks. This quasi-remake of a 1979 caper film (which starred George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg) makes wholesale changes to the structure of its forebear – unfortunately few of them are for the better. An in...

The House of Tomorrow is ripe with metaphors, from inventor R. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome house to the omnipresent sounds of punk rock and all the music genre represents. The film depicts a radical coming-of-age for wallflower Sebast...

Love, Simon is, at it’s core, a crowd-pleaser about an “average” high school guy who finds love in the most unlikely of places. Part romantic-comedy, part coming-of-age story, it recalls the more innocent “high school” films of the p...

Since the demise of Friends, Jennifer Aniston has been desperately striving to find her motion picture niche. Despite having started her fifth decade of life (in an industry that is not kind to actresses over 40), she remains a bankable name, even...

Considering how ubiquitous social media has become in the early 21st century, it’s surprising how few films have used this cultural element as the foundation for a movie plot (rather than just window dressing). Nerve seeks to rectify this overs...

Someone could write a compelling thesis about humanity's obsession with the apocalypse. Over the years, the cinema has exploited this affinity, most often in disaster movies. Lately, however, there has been a trend toward end-of-the-world films tha...

Potential Spoilers: I reveal a little more about the plot than I normally do in reviews, primarily because I want to discuss the way the film progresses during its second half. There are no big "reveals" in the review - it's not the kind of movie t...

Spoilers! Nothing is explicitly revealed but something is implied. For about a half-hour, Tully is damn near brilliant. An incisive, relentless takedown of the myth of new parenting, Diablo Cody’s screenplay highlights the incessant crying, ...