SUPERMAN – John Murphy, David Fleming
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS. IF YOU HAVE NOT YET SEEN THE FILM, YOU MIGHT WANT TO CONSIDER WAITING UNTIL AFTER YOU HAVE DONE SO TO READ IT.
I was three years old when the Richard Donner Superman movie came out in 1978. It’s one of the first films I remember watching as a child, when it was shown on TV several years later, and it’s one of the first film scores I remember loving. For me Christopher Reeve remains the absolute gold standard when it comes to portraying the man of steel. In the almost 50 years since then we have seen different Supermen on the big screen – Brandon Routh and Henry Cavill – and on the small screen – Dean Cain, Tom Welling, others – all of whom bring a new take and new perspective on the character. This year’s Superman is actor David Corenswet, and the film is simply called ‘Superman’. Thankfully it’s not another origin story, and instead the film jumps right into the action with Superman and his journalistic alter-ego Clark Kent embroiled in battles on multiple fronts: fighting against the machinations of his nemesis Lex Luthor, trying to keep the peace between the fictional warring nations of Boravia and Jarhanpur, and trying to maintain his own sense of self and identity following some shocking revelations about his parentage, while also having a relationship with his colleague, investigative journalist Lois Lane, who knows his secret identity. Eventually all these plot strands converge in a battle to save Metropolis. Read more…
KEY LARGO – Max Steiner
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Warner Brothers had produced four very successful films that paired marquee actors Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart; Bullets or Ballots (1936), Kid Galahad (1937), The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938) and Brother Orchid (1940). They decided on yet another collaboration after purchasing the film rights for the 1939 play “Key Largo” by Maxwell Anderson. Jerry Wald was placed in charge of production with a $1.8 million budget, John Huston would direct, and Huston and Richard Brooks would write the screenplay. The cast was stellar with Humphrey Bogart as Major Frank “Soldier” McCloud, Edward G. Robinson as Johnny Rocco, Lauren Bacall as Nora Temple, Lionel Barrymore as James Temple, and Claire Trevor as Gaye Dawn. Read more…
LORD OF ILLUSIONS – Simon Boswell
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Lord of Illusions is an excellent, underrated film written and directed by horror legend Clive Barker, based on his own short story The Last Illusion. The story blends elements detective noir, supernatural horror, and dark fantasy, and was his third directorial effort following Hellraiser in 1987 and Nightbreed in 1990. Scott Bakula stars as Harry D’Amour, a hardboiled private investigator based in New York who specializes in cases involving the occult. After traveling to Los Angeles on a routine insurance case, D’Amour stumbles into a far more sinister world involving the remnants of a doomsday cult once led by the charismatic and sadistic sorcerer named Nix (Daniel von Bargen). Thirteen years earlier, Nix had attempted to unleash dark powers upon the world but was stopped by his former disciple Philip Swann (Kevin J. O’Connor) and a group of fellow magicians. Swann has since become a world-famous illusionist, having buried the truth of his real supernatural powers beneath a layer of stage trickery. As D’Amour investigates further, he becomes entangled in a deadly conspiracy when Swann is killed during a stage performance gone wrong, and Swann’s widow Dorothea (Famke Janssen) enlists D’Amour’s help to uncover the truth behind her husband’s death. Read more…
JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s amazing to think that it has now been more than 30 years since the first Jurassic Park movie, and that we are now on our seventh film in the franchise that originated from Michael Crichton’s classic sci-fi adventure novel. The latest film, Jurassic World: Rebirth, takes place five years after the events of the last film, Jurassic World: Dominion, and is set in a near-future time where the descendants of the original cloned dinosaurs continue to co-exist with humans. However, due to a warming planet, the dinosaurs have been forced to reside in areas around the equator, and are beginning to dwindle in number. The plot involves a pharmaceutical company who sends a team into one of these equatorial areas to obtain bio-samples from three different dinosaur specimens, which may hold the key to creating a groundbreaking new heart disease treatment. Of course, things go wrong as they always do, when the team encounters a previously unknown and incredibly violent dinosaur clone mutation. The film stars Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali, and Rupert Friend, is written by David Koepp (who wrote the original Jurassic Park and its first sequel The Lost World), and is directed by Gareth Edwards. Read more…
MILDRED PIERCE – Max Steiner
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
After eighteen years as a marquee actress for MGM, Joan Crawford departed the studio in search of better roles, signing a three-year contract with Warner Brothers. The studio had purchased the film rights to the popular novel “Mildred Pierce” by James M. Cain and Crawford campaigned hard for the role. Director Michael Curtiz did not believe she was right for the role, but relented when she acquiesced to the indignity of a screen test, which changed his mind. Jerry Wald was placed in charge of production with a $1.4 million budget, Curtiz would direct, and Ranald MacDougall was hired to write the screenplay. Joining Crawford would be Jack Carson as Wally Fray, Zachary Scott as Monte Beragon, Eve Arden as Ida Corwin, Ann Blyth as Veda Pierce Forrester, and Bruce Bennett as Bert Pierce. Read more…
Mark Snow, 1946-2025
Composer Mark Snow died on July 4, 2025, at his home in Connecticut after a short illness. He was 78.
Martin Fulterman was born in August 1946, in Brooklyn, New York. He studied piano as a child, and he later attended New York’s High School of Music and Art and the Juilliard School of Music, where his roommate was fellow composer Michael Kamen. They co-founded the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, and released several well-regarded albums.
Fulterman adopted the professional pseudonym ‘Mark Snow’ after he moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. He began his film and TV career writing music for the ABC drama series The Rookies starring his then-brother-in-law, actor Georg Stanford Brown, and quickly established himself as one of the most in-demand composers working on American television, writing for massively popular shows such as Starsky & Hutch, The Love Boat, Hart to Hart, Dynasty, Cagney & Lacey, and T. J. Hooker.
However, it was his association with the 1993 sci-fi series The X-Files starring David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson that brought Snow to international fame. In addition to writing its iconic whistled main theme, Snow scored more than 200 episodes of the show across 11 seasons, as well as scoring its two spin-off theatrical movies in 1998 and 2008. The single of the instrumental main title theme was an unexpected chart hit in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, and he received five Emmy nominations for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series between 1997 and 2002 for different X-Files episodes.
Snow also received Emmy nominations for scoring the TV series Ghost Whisperer (2005-2010), writing the theme for Nowhere Man (1996), and for scoring the TV movies Something About Amelia (1984), An American Story (1993), Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1994), Children of the Dust (1995), and Helter Skelter (2004). Read more…
SPECIES – Christopher Young
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Species is a science fiction horror film that blends alien-invasion tropes with creature-feature thrills. Directed by Roger Donaldson from a screenplay by Dennis Feldman, the story begins with a top-secret government project called SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which receives a transmission from outer space containing DNA instructions for creating a hybrid organism – part human, part alien. Scientists follow the instructions and create a girl named Sil, who appears human but matures at an astonishing rate and soon exhibits alarming, inhuman traits. When the SETI lead scientist Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley) deems her too dangerous, they attempt to terminate her, but she escapes from the lab; now fully grown and played by Natasha Henstridge, Sil goes on the run in Los Angeles, driven by a primal urge to reproduce. Her alien DNA pushes her to find a mate, but any man she deems genetically unfit meets a gruesome end. A team is assembled to track her down, including an empath (Forest Whitaker), a molecular biologist (Alfred Molina), an anthropologist (Marg Helgenberger), and a government assassin (Michael Madsen), and as Sil leaves a trail of bodies behind her, the team races against time to prevent her from mating and giving birth to a potentially unstoppable alien species. Read more…
F1: THE MOVIE – Hans Zimmer
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s lights out and away we go!
Anyone who knows me in real life knows that I have been a massive fan of Formula 1 motor racing for many, many years. My grandfather, who was also a big fan, introduced me to it in the late 1980s – the first race I actively remember watching was the 1987 British Grand Prix, when I was 11, which was won by Nigel Mansell in extraordinarily emotional circumstances – and since then I have watched virtually every race of every subsequent season, cheering on a succession of great British drivers, from Mansell to Martin Brundle, Damon Hill and Johnny Herbert, Jenson Button, and now Lando Norris and George Russell. I love everything about the sport; the incredible skill and strength of the drivers, the chess-like tactics and strategies of the teams, the world-class engineering. You become invested in the lives of everyone involved, their triumphs and tragedies, and you watch it unfold across the world every two weeks at speeds approaching 200mph. There’s nothing like it. Read more…
BEAU GESTE – Alfred Newman
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Paramount Pictures executives decided that they wanted to remake their 1926 silent film “Beau Geste”, which starred Ronald Coleman. William Wellman was assigned production, he would also direct, and Robert Carson was tasked with writing the screenplay. The 1926 film was based on the novel “Beau Geste” (1924) by P. C. Wren and the creative team ultimately decided to adopt the screenplay of the 1926 film almost verbatim. For the cast, Gary Cooper would star in the titular role, joined by Ray Milland as John Geste, Robert Preston as Digby Geste, J. Carrol Naish as Rasinoff, Susan Hayward as Isobel Rivers, and Brian Donlevy as Sergeant Markoff. Read more…
Lalo Schifrin, 1932-2025
Composer, pianist and conductor Lalo Schifrin died at his home in Los Angeles on June 26, 2025, at the age of 93, from complications of pneumonia.
One of the most versatile and distinctive film composers of the twentieth century, Schifrin wrote music for more than 100 films and television productions, received six Academy Award nominations and won four Grammy Awards. His scores encompassed jazz, funk, Latin music, avant-garde experimentation and large-scale symphonic writing, but his most famous composition remains the instantly recognizable theme for Mission: Impossible.
Boris Claudio Schifrin was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on June 21, 1932. His father Luis was concertmaster at the Teatro Colón, and Schifrin began studying piano at five. After early training in Argentina he received a scholarship to the Paris Conservatoire, where his studies included work with Olivier Messiaen and Charles Koechlin. At the same time he immersed himself in jazz, performing in Paris clubs and developing the combination of classical technique and rhythmic freedom that would become central to his musical personality.
Returning to Argentina in 1956, Schifrin formed a jazz orchestra and came to the attention of Dizzy Gillespie, who encouraged him to move to the United States. Schifrin subsequently became pianist and arranger for Gillespie and composed the acclaimed Gillespiana, beginning an enduring career in jazz alongside his work for the screen. He also arranged and recorded with musicians including Count Basie, Stan Getz, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald.
Schifrin moved to Los Angeles in 1963 and quickly became established in film and television. Early feature assignments included Rhino! (1964) and The Cincinnati Kid (1965), while television brought him work on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and, in 1966, the assignment that changed his career. For Mission: Impossible he wrote a propulsive main theme in unusual 5/4 time, combining insistent percussion, brass and flute into one of the most instantly identifiable television themes ever composed. It won Grammys for Best Instrumental Theme and Best Original Score for a Motion Picture or Television Show and later became an essential part of the Tom Cruise film series. Read more…
JUDGE DREDD – Alan Silvestri
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The character Judge Dredd was well-known to British comic book fans for almost 20 years prior to him debuting on film. Created by writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra, he first appeared in the second issue of the British science fiction comic magazine 2000 AD in 1977, and quickly became the most iconic character of the anthology, known for his authoritarian demeanor, brutal sense of justice, and unwavering loyalty to the law. Set in a post-apocalyptic future, the Dredd stories have strong satirical and political overtones, exploring themes ranging from fascism to state surveillance, corporate corruption, and dystopia. Dredd himself is not the protagonist in a traditional sense – instead, he is a symbol of rigid, authoritarian justice, who has no personal ambition, rarely shows emotion, and sees mercy as weakness. Attempts to adapt Judge Dredd for the big screen began in the 1980s but the screenplay was stuck in development hell for years; the film eventually moved forward in 1994 with director Danny Cannon, a self-proclaimed fan of the comic, who was given the green light by the studio on the strength of his directorial debut The Young Americans in 1993. Unfortunately, subsequent interference and script re-writes heavily altered his intended vision, resulting in a film which disappointed long-time fans of the series. Read more…
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON – John Powell
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In 2010 Dreamworks Pictures released an animated adventure film based on Cressida Cowell’s popular children’s novel How to Train Your Dragon. Set on the mythical Viking island of Berk, the film follows Hiccup, a skinny and awkward teenager, who is also the son of the village chief, Stoick the Vast. In Berk, dragon attacks are a regular hazard, and slaying them is a mark of honor; Hiccup desperately wants to prove himself to his father and the village but lacks the brute strength of the other Viking youths. Fearing that he will never earn his father’s respect, Hiccup resigns himself to the fact that he will never become a dragon slayer – until the day that Hiccup accidentally shoots down a rare and mysterious dragon known as a Night Fury, and in doing so upends everything he thinks he knows about dragons. Read more…
ARSENIC AND OLD LACE – Max Steiner
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Renowned producer and director Frank Capra saw opportunity with the popular success of the Broadway play “Arsenic and Old Lace”, which was adapted from Joseph Kesserling’s novel of the same name. He purchased the film rights, however the contract stipulated that the film could not be released until the Broadway run had ended. Due to the enduring success of the play, the film debut was delayed by almost two years. Capra would manage production with a budget of $1.2 million, and also direct, with Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein writing the screenplay based on Joseph Kesselring’s novel. A fine cast was hired, with Cary Grant starring as Mortimer Brewster, Priscilla Lane as Elaine Brewster, Raymond Massey as Jonathan Brewster, Jack Carson as Officer Patrick O’Hara, and Peter Lorre as Dr, Herman Einstein. Read more…
POCAHONTAS – Alan Menken, Stephen Schwartz
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The idea to make a movie about the life of Pocahontas was first pitched to Walt Disney studios in 1990, shortly after the success of The Little Mermaid, and as Beauty and the Beast was in production. The studio was looking to diversify its slate with more mature, emotionally grounded stories, and chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg was eager to pursue more prestigious, award-caliber projects. He saw Pocahontas as a chance for Disney to do a “serious” animated film with Oscar potential, aimed at adults as much as children, and described the film as potentially Disney’s equivalent of West Side Story or Dances with Wolves – emotionally resonant, message-driven, and grounded in real-world conflict. Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg were hired as directors, and during development Pocahontas was considered the “prestige” project compared to another film in development simultaneously – The Lion King. Many animators reportedly lobbied to work on Pocahontas, which was expected to win awards, while The Lion King was seen as the “B project,” although ironically it was The Lion King that would become a much bigger global phenomenon, both critically and commercially. Read more…
THE LIFE OF CHUCK – The Newton Brothers
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Life of Chuck is an unusual, but ultimately warm-hearted and life-affirming story that touches on subjects no less important than the meaning of life itself, which it explores in a way that combines art, dance, poetry, music, mathematics, philosophy, existentialism, and a little bit of supernatural magic. It is based on a novella by Stephen King that was published in the 2020 anthology book ‘If It Bleeds’; similar to things like The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me, it is not a horror story, and instead is more of a rumination on the nature of reality. Told in reverse chronological order, it traces the life of a man named Charles “Chuck” Krantz, played by Tom Hiddleston as an adult. To reveal more of the plot would do it a disservice, so I’ll leave it at that, but at its core the story is a meditation on mortality, memory, and the idea that a single life contains a universe, as Walt Whitman once proposed. Rather than horror, it delivers awe – both for how fragile the world is, and how astonishingly rich a single human life can be if we take the time to make it so. Read more…
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