Movies starring Dan

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 ...

Ron Howard’s Eden takes inspiration from a bizarre but true series of events in the 1930s, refracted through the lens of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Set on the isle of Floreana in the Galápagos chain, the film chronicles the escalati...

Considering the talent involved and the strength of the source material, there's no way Edge of Darkness should have been this disappointing. Part of the problem is a direct result of condensation - there's no way to cram six hours of the dense mi...

As improbable a concoction as it might seem, Edge of Tomorrow is a curious mix of ingredients from the 1993 Harold Ramis/Bill Murray comedy, Groundhog Day, and James Cameron's 1986 sequel to Alien. An Earth-versus-aliens tale set in the near future...