Search for Daniel

Let me begin by stating that I cannot recommend Under the Skin to audiences in search of a mainstream movie experience. This film, a cryptic adaptation of Michel Faber's novel, is all about mood and setting. It's as existential as a sci-fi/horror f...

Welcome to film noir, Soderbergh-style. For his latest effort (and fourth feature), the talented director who made the dialogue-and-character-rich sex, lies, and videotape turns his attention to this talky update of 1949's Criss Cross. Focus...

Spoiler warning: The movie is based on real people and events so I am less constrained about revealing certain historical facts than I might be with a fictional account. The story told in Vincere, despite being as faithful to history as one can ...

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the musical had become one of the most popular motion picture genres. The list of past hits was impressive, including titles like Singin' in the Rain, South Pacific, The King and I, Oklahoma!, An American in Pari...

Winter's Bone offers a case study in the essential philosophical differences between independent motion picture thrillers and Hollywood/mainstream ones. The third feature from director Debra Granik and winner of two awards at the 2010 Sundance Fil...

Wonderful World feels like a modern-day half-baked riff on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Despite a film festival pedigree (it was shown at a number of local festivals on the 2009 circuit), the movie is so lightweight and inconsequential that ...

The problem with X2 is essentially the same one that plagued X-Men: too many characters, resulting in too little screen time for each one. X2 may be the most ambitious superhero motion picture to date, but it doesn't work quite as well as Spider-...

Although the idea behind Yesterday was to craft a love-letter to The Beatles, the end result tastes a lot like a typical Richard Curtis rom-com with a generous helping of John-Paul-George-Ringo gravy. Less reliant on pop music than either Bohe...

As a writer by trade (at least before he started directing), David Koepp should know that a good ending is at least as important as a good beginning, if not more so.  You Should Have Left, a haunted house movie that doubles as an homage to St...