Search for Thomas Newman

With a legion of titles like Pet Sematary, Firewalker, Sleepwalkers, Maximum Overdrive, and Children of the Corn, it's reasonable not to expect much from Stephen King-inspired motion pictures. Adaptations of the prolific author's work typically va...

There's something delightfully old-fashioned about Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects. It's the kind of thriller that Alfred Hitchcock might make if he was still alive and active today. It never seeks to do too much with the premise nor does it go ov...

Skyfall can take its place alongside From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, and On Her Majesty's Secret Service as the best Bond can offer. With an Oscar winner at the helm and Oscar winners in two prominent roles, Skyfall overflows with talent but, as...

Warning: Oblique spoilers. An “average” James Bond movie can be described using three words: “satisfying but flawed.” To the extent that’s true, Spectre fills the mold. Overplotted and at least 20 minutes too long, t...

Over the years, war films have come into and gone out of vogue. At one point, they were mostly about heroism and valor on the battlefield but that changed with 1946’s The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler’s story about how winning the ...

Tolkien represents a classic standard-order biopic – a high-level profile of someone with minimal flesh on the bones. More like the dramatization of an Encyclopedia Britannica entry than a fully rendered movie, Tolkien provides details about ...

Towelhead is a victim of the economics of movie-making. Despite being a critical success at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival (where is played under the name of Nothing Is Private), Towelhead has languished on shelves for a full year. With Warner Br...

Victoria and Abdul, based on (mostly) true events as related in Shrabani Basu’s historical chronicle of the same name, is effectively a sequel to the 1997 film, Mrs. Brown. That movie, directed by John Madden, detailed Queen Victoria’s fri...

Put simply, WALL-E is about as charming as movies get. In an animated marketplace where everything is starting to look and feel the same, WALL-E stands out because it exhibits a unique identity without losing its appeal to viewers of all ages. It...

White Oleander is a flower - a hearty-but-poisonous flower whose beauty makes it appear deceptively fragile. This blossom, which appears several times throughout the film that takes its name, is a perfect metaphor for Ingrid Magnussen, the charact...