Movie Reviews
Titles starting with D
Danny Deckchair
Danny Deckchair (2003) I don’t know how you pronounce “Capra” in Australian, but that’s the word here. Some people can’t take Frank Capra’s corny populism and eternal optimism. To me, it’s a tough trick to turn, but if you can do it, I like it. I’m not saying I believe it; I just like to think for the length of a movie that the world might be that way, every once in a while. This story was ... Read more »
Dante’s Inferno
We think we have epic films today, with all the CGI and other special effects to flesh out sets that barely exist in real life. I am still sometimes surprised to see just how gigantic scenes could be in the old days, when there was nothing available but some double exposure to combine several scenes of the same extras into one shot. This film is famous for its ten-minute creation of Hell, ... Read more »
The Darjeeling Limited
I know things aren’t going well when I begin mentally writing my review 30 minutes into the film, and leafing through my mind’s thesaurus seeking synonyms for pretentious, boring, and just plain bad. This is written and directed by Wes Anderson. I liked his The Royal Tenenbaums well enough, and thought Rushmore was very good. Then we ... Read more »
Dark Blue
Director Ron Shelton is best known for his cynical and funny sports movies like Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump, and Tin Cup. The story (but not the screenplay) is by James Ellroy, and this movie is solidly in his territory, the dark side of Los Angeles and the LAPD. We all know of the scandals the L.A. cops have been involved in, but ... Read more »
Dark City
There’s dark, and then there’s dark. I wouldn’t advise watching this one during the daytime unless you’ve got a room with no windows. Now, there have been plenty of dark movies in the last decades, and some of them are quite annoying, becoming murky when there is no real excuse for it. But this one has an excellent excuse: There is no sun. Aliens have taken a ... Read more »
Dark Horse: The Incredible True Story of Dream Alliance
One of the better feel-good documentaries. A barmaid in a working-class town in Wales buys a broken-down racehorse for £350. She breeds him and the result is a horse called Dream Alliance. They name him that because there is a group of working-class investors who each contribute £10 a month, a considerable sum for most of them. There is no group of people snobbier than the British ... Read more »
The Dark Knight
I just read an article about David Edelstein, a critic for New York Magazine, who gave this movie a fairly bad review. By no means a total pan (50%), but far from glowing. I understand he’s been deluged with angry letters, some of them tipping over the edge into what you might call hate mail. Now, I’ve read his review, and I don’t agree with all of it, but Read more »
Dark Matter
How is it that a movie starring Meryl Streep managed to fly totally under my radar? I had literally never heard of it until I saw the DVD on the shelf at Goodwill. It came between The Devil Wore Prada and Rendition, and seems to have had a very limited release.
Now I can see why. I hated this piece of shit. It is loosely based ... Read more »
Dark Passage
The same year this was made another movie, The Lady in the Lake, was made with the camera being the POV of the actor. In that case it was Robert Montgomery as Philip Marlowe. There, it was pretty much a gimmick. Not here, though you don’t seen Humphrey Bogart’s face until a little over halfway through. For the first part, we see him in shadow, or from behind, but ... Read more »