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Even before the introduction of sound film, westerns were already a popular genre, but sound gave the genre a rather explosive leap, which in turn led to a number of extraordinarily successful series, like Hopalong Cassidy, which spanned 40+ films before star William (Bill) Boyd...[read full review]

Whether fans and critics like it or not, Dario Argento is fond of two genres he revisits with predictable regularity: the giallo (Deep Red, Sleepless) and the supernatural thriller (Suspiria, Inferno), and it shouldn't surprise anyone that The Card Player (a giallo cum police procedural thriller...[read full review]

An obscure and little-known series outside of Italy (the series is thus far only referenced in Wikipedia), Giallo (“Yellow”) was a weekly half-hour show edited and presented by Enzo Tortora, for which Dario Argento directed a series of 3-minute thriller and horror vignettes shot on film which...[read full review]

When Britain entered WWII, production halted on Alexander Korda's The Thief of Bagdad, and the producer marshaled a cachet of that film's talent pool towards developing and realizing a propaganda feature that outlined the country's patient efforts to avoid war with Germany until there simply was no choice...[read full review]

Thomas Newman's re-teaming with director Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo) had the composer integrating three cuts from the musical Hello, Dolly! plus material co-composed by Peter Gabriel into his original score, and the results on CD are quite uniform, if not pretty charming... [read full review]

Even if one can't get into the dense mythology of the Narnia series, it's hard not to be moved by the grand, epic sound that was previously reserved for big historical epics during the fifties and sixties or star-studded war films, or the sci-fi epics of the seventies and eighties. That isn't to discount ... [read full review]

Writer/director Roberto Faenza's weird anti-capitalist drama of a father who indoctrinates his rebellious son into becoming a sublime businessman was given a suitably strange score by Ennio Morrcione, which begins with a benign, cheerful little theme with soothing harmonics from gentle strings... [read full review]

Unlike La Ragazzina (1974) and Blue Jeans (1975), this latest tribute to the assets and tarty onscreen behaviour of Gloria Guida from DigitMovies pairs two entries in the actress' ‘teacher' series – La Liceale / La Liceale nella classe dei ripetenti - which dealt with a hot chick, horny students, and... [read full review]

If core members of the prog-rock group Goblin reassembled twenty years later, what kind of new music would they compose, particularly after some went on to enjoy non-film careers, while others maintained active roles with the band as it moved exclusively towards film scoring during the mid-seventies?... [read full review]

Released in and around 2005/2006, and apparently crafted over a 3-year period, Dawn of the Goblin consists of cover versions of three themes from Goblin's much-beloved Zombi / Dawn of the Dead (1978) soundtrack – “Zombi,” “L'alba dei morti viventi,” and “La caccia”... [read full review]

It had been 10 years since Lalo Schifrin scored Magnum Force (1975), the first sequel to the original Dirty Harry (1971), another major creative and career step wherein the composer introduced a fresh, urban-fusion jazz sound to filmgoers. Although the scoring duty for the next two sequels... [read full review]

Ryan's Schifrin's film is a straightforward B-movie about a mountain creature that likes to devour tear up and human flesh (not necessarily in that order), and although father Lalo Schifrin has written a dead-faced score, the arching main motif for the monster is slyly tongue-in... [read full review]