Dead Calm

Nicole Kidman’s breakout role, I think. She has a lot of credits before this, but I’ve never heard of any of them. They might have been big in Australia. After this, her next role was in Days of Thunder, with soon-to-be-wacko-Scientologist hubby Tom Cruise. From there it was onward and upward. This is a dandy little thriller with only three characters (Sam Neill ... Read more »

The Dead Girl

Toni Collette finds the body of a girl who has been raped, mutilated, and murdered in a field where she is walking. She reports it to the police, earning a blistering scolding from her bedridden, crazy mother, Piper Laurie, who is basically channeling her own performance in Carrie. There is a deep, dark secret in this household. Toni wants to be tied up and raped ... Read more »

Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round

One of the all-time great titles, huh? It has nothing to do with the story, but what the hell. You have to call it something, and this is a lot better than Just Another Heist Movie.

I love caper/heist movies, and this is an outstanding one. Not quite in the class of Topkapi or The Hot Rock, maybe, but ... Read more »

Dead Like Me

This is on Showtime, and it’s killing me that the new season is starting in a few weeks and we don’t get it. The first season is on 4 DVDs: the 75-minute pilot on the first one, and about a dozen 45-minute episodes on the others. George (Georgia) Lass is an 18-year-old girl who is killed by a re-entering toilet seat from the Mir space station. This is only the first of the unlikely ways to ... Read more »

Dead Like Me: Life After Death

If you aren’t familiar with the series: When we die, a certain percentage of us are tapped—apparently at random—to be Grim Reapers. Reapers are dead, but don’t seem so, and other than the fact they can’t be killed, are just like you and me. Their job is to remove the souls of people who are about to die. They gather every morning in a Waffle House where their boss, Rube (Mandy Patinkin), ... Read more »

Dead Man Down

Dead Man Down (2013) Revenge! Sounds so good when you think about it, but if you’re really going to do it, in the most extreme possible ways, it may not be as easy as you thought it would be.

Noomi Rapace’s face has been disfigured in a car accident by a drunk driver, who only got a three-week jail sentence. She got over a year of reconstructive surgery and a hideous band of little ... Read more »

Dead Man’s Walk

This was the first chronologically and the third book in order of publication. It takes place in Texas, as they all do, mostly, in 1845, in the Republic of Texas just before statehood. Texas needed peace officers, mostly to fight the Comanche, and so the Texas Rangers were formed. McRae and Call, who are just boys, sign up and find themselves on an extremely ill-advised invasion of New ... Read more »

The (Dead Mothers) Club

This purported to be an exploration of what it is like to lose your mother when you are young. The headliners are Jane Fonda, Rosie O’Donnell, and Molly Shannon. Fonda’s mother slit her own throat when Jane was twelve. When Rosie was eleven her mother died of breast cancer. Shannon’s family was in a terrible car wreck when she was four. Her mother, younger sister, and cousin were killed. ... Read more »

Dead of Night

A premonition, a ghost, an evil mirror, an evil ventriloquist puppet … these are the tales of extraordinary happenings seven people tell each other in the drawing room of an English country house. The tales are prompted by the appearance of a man who swears he has been dreaming of this house and these people for years, though he’s never been there before. The guests in turn tell their ... Read more »

Dead of Winter

Mary Steenburgen is a struggling actress. She also plays bad twin sisters. The actress is hired to impersonate one of the sisters, thinking she is auditioning for a role in a movie where the star died. But the real goal of the tape she makes is hidden from her. She is trapped in an old house in the dead of winter, with no way to get out, and increasingly certain that they intend to kill ... Read more »