Rating:****

For some reason I always forget about Laurence Rosenthal. I have a few of his CDs and they’re excellent, but I only seem to remember how good he is when I stumble across one of his albums out of the blue. Take Lala Land’s (sadly out of print) release of The Island of [...]

Rating: ***

Dragonball Evolution is a film that you’ve probably already forgotten based on a tv-show/videogame/toy/merchandising empire from Japan. I know it is as the show that’s occasionally on Cartoon Network late at night when I’m hoping for a rerun of Pinky and the Brain. I’m sure if I sat through an episode I’d [...]

Rating: ***

As near as I can tell, Red Riding is a British miniseries about Yorkshire serial killings in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It is definitely not a direct adaptation of a fairy tale about a little girl who gets eaten by a wolf. I checked. However, it does feature music from three [...]

Rating: *** 1/2

In my 2007 review for Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, I posed what I thought was a rather straightforward question: “What could be more bad-ass than a guy who goes out of his way to hunt vampires, right?” At the time, I assumed that the obvious answer was: “Nothing – nothing could be [...]

Rating: *** 1/2

Rachel Portman gets a lot of shit from the film music community, and much of it she doesn’t deserve. For some reason, when someone like John Williams scores multiple Sci-Fi adventure fantasies with the same set of stylistic devices back-to-back, most of us don’t raise a word of criticism – in fact we [...]

Rating: ****

It sort of staggers me that Elmer Bernstein always gets credit for being the first person to score comedy as though it were drama when John Morris did just that for earlier films that were just as famous and influential. In particular, I think of his scores for Mel Brooks three best films, The [...]

Music Composed by Bernard Herrmann
Rating: ****

Bernard Herrmann has frequently been referred to as the finest film composer in the history of the cinema, a title that makes criticizing anything the man wrote a dangerous game. It makes one hesitant to pick up his lesser-known works, for fear that the heaps of praise that come in [...]

Music Composed by Mark Isham
Rating: *** 1/2

Mark Isham is a film composer who got his start as a jazz musician and while he rarely gets a chance to exhibit that trait in his film work, the intricate sensitivity of a jazz artist has influenced the technique of every score he has touched. His music is [...]

Rating: *****

I’m not really in the “know” when it comes to these cult sci-fi trends. I’ve seen maybe an episode or two of Twilight Zone and Star Trek, I’m aware of Lost in Space and Doctor Who, and I understand that they’re extremely well liked within a certain group of people. The [...]

Music Composed by Danny Elfman
Rating: **** 1/2

At this point, I don’t think it would be hyperbole to claim that the director-composer relationship between Tim Burton and Danny Elfman stands as one of the most significant in recent cinema history. The two have worked on more than 10 films, and at their peak with the bittersweet [...]