Movies starring Dan

Hours after seeing Dream House, I was still trying to figure out how a movie starring Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, and Naomi Watts, lensed by Caleb Deschanel, and directed by Jim Sheridan could be such a disappointment. It's obvious what's wrong wit...

Dreamgirls is a wonderful entertainment: a musical that, while not skimping on the music, delivers a multi-layered storyline featuring complex characters. The average Hollywood musical focuses on spectacle and, while there's some of that to be fou...

Driving Miss Daisy, the first movie to win the Best Picture Oscar during the decade of the 1990s, is, at its heart, a buddy film. Although some may see that as degrading something that addresses serious issues (like racism and anti-Semitism in...

In recent years, I have complained about the inability of movies to close strongly. Numerous films with promising beginnings and middles have fallen apart at the end. Thankfully, that's not the case with The Dukes, where a satisfying final half-h...

Sometimes, a movie just can't live up to its advertising campaign (or its name, for that matter). Dumb and Dumber is one such case. Take the newspaper ad, for example, filled with all those fake, witty quotes. That's rather clever (although not o...

What propels filmmakers to make a sequel to a 20-year old film? Is it nostalgia for the brand of comedy that characterized the original? Is it desperation on everyone's part to revive flagging careers? Or is it Hollywood's acceptance that recogniz...

Dumb Money is many things but one thing it isn’t is “dumb.” An engagingly lighthearted rags-to-riches romp with a David vs. Goliath element, the movie uses its real-life basis to formulate a modern day fairy tale. It’s easy to criticize th...

Dumbo is a perfectly adequate family film. While that may seem like damning with faint praise, keep in mind that this movie was never considered to be among Disney’s 2019 big guns. It fills a niche and does so nicely with a style and approac...

Most movies about teenagers come in one of two flavors: romantic comedies or sex comedies. Then there are films like Easy A - smart, satirical jabs at aspects of popular culture that defy simplistic classification. These may be set in schools but...

Although The Eclipse is technically a horror film, dealing as it does with issues of the supernatural, it has the heart of a romance and the tone of a drama. It's slow, thoughtful, and melancholy - at times seeming to forget that a ghost story is ...