Dead Calm (1989)

Phillip Noyce sailed Nicole Kidman from the Australian small-time to the Hollywood big screen with his adaptation of Charles Williams' Dead Calm, a nautical thriller about a couple, Kidman's Rae Ingram and her husband John (Sam Neill) - characters who first appeared in Williams' Aground - on a sailing trip to recover from tragedy, but while becalmed they spot a yacht in distress and make the mistake of stopping to help the yacht's sole survivor (Billy Zane, in 1989, youthful and smouldering) - the confined-space thrills-at-sea has a beautiful simplicity with the three characters in a sphere of action no larger that just the speck of a yacht in the ocean..

★★★★☆

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Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Look at online photos from the real incident at Chase Manhattan Bank in 1972, and photos of the real robber John Wojtowicz - in the movie, Sonny Wortzik, played by Al Pacino - and you'll be impressed by the likenesses, but exactly why these events led to such a painstakingly recreated film treatment by Sidney Lumet is lost in time: hailed for its portrayal of desperate 1970s New York, the film in fact revels in two other things - the comic chaos of the bungled robbery turned fourteen-hour hostage situation, and the fact Wojtowicz apparently wanted the stolen money to fund a lover's gender-affirming surgery - and, though well acted, is ultimately as chaotic and unrewarding as the robbery - a dull little mess - itself.

★★★☆☆

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The Day Of The Jackal (1973)

There is so much detail in Fred Zinnemann's riveting adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal - European filming locations; real people on the street unaware they are being filmed, an audacious plot that sweeps through multiple countries yet also manages to detail the minutiae of the characters' day-to-day - that at times the political thriller starts to feel like a documentary, lending real-time urgency as we follow Edward Fox's Jackal, an assassin for hire meticulously plotting the assassination of Charles de Gaulle while the Parisian police struggle to track him, a faceless, nameless master of disguise.

★★★★★

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Dead of Winter (2025)

I'm sure the first two encounters the widow (Emma Thompson) has with the crims in this snowbound thriller are shown out-of-order - as it is, the first encounter is redundant, and the second, in light of the first, is, on the part of the crims, idiotic - and this continuity problem hangs over the first hour, calling into doubt all of the zigzagging the players do back and forth and back and forth between a cabin in the woods and an icy lake, but eventually, the action crescendos to something that allows you to surrender your reservations, and it is nice to see these Harry Brown-style thrillers in which an older person violently takes down deserving crims.

★★★☆☆

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Nightwatch - Demons Are Forever ('Nattevagten – Dæmoner går i arv') (2023)

You need to have seen the 1994 original to appreciate the genius of this sequel that takes the themes and look of the original and cements them as classic by reworking the story with a new gender politic, putting Fanny Leander Bornedal in the lead role as the daughter of Nikolaj Coster-Waldau's character in the original - she takes on the morgue nightwatch job to better understand her parents' ordeal - and just when you think things are going to be too same-same (moths in the light fittings, alarm lights that threaten to go off...) this gnarly, twisted mystery really goes places!

★★★★☆

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Delirium (Óráð) (2023)

I had to turn this Icelandic horror movie off at the mandolin finger-slicing scene, despite my interest in the first half, which is effectively creepy and made me deeply uneasy.  

RATING: NO RATING (I can't finish it!)

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Death Wish (1974)

For one brief moment, Charles Bronson's Dr Paul Kersey - an architect whose wife is killed and daughter raped by gangbangers (one of them a young and lanky Jeff Goldblum) - steps out onto a NYC rooftop and surveys the city from above, and this vigilante may as well be in Gothan in a mask and cape, or, come to think of it, perhaps he's more like Victor Zsasz because it's a pretty unpleasant, unrewarding, socially troubling revenge he metes out.

★★★☆☆

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Deep Rising (1998)

Imagine Die Hard banged together with Alien, without the sophistication, on a cruise liner at sea, with a cheesy Big Trouble In Little China sort of all-American goofball lead and BTILC-esque special effects, and you've got this zany cult classic, so bad it's fun, about a hijacked boat full of torpedoes, a cruise ship overrun with winding gnashing alien (?) creatures, some ghastly body horror, and if it sounds mad consider the rumors that the never-made sequel, Deep Rising 2, was to be set on Skull Island and feature King Kong, as if this original weren't already loopy enough!

★★★☆☆

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Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

My finger hovered over the OFF button right the way through the first half hour of this umpteenth Deadpool movie, one with long-dead Wolverine brought back to life and injected into the story for what proves very little reason, but then something Ryan Reynolds says made me laugh despite my wariness of wanton pop-song-accompanied violence and all of a sudden the credits were rolling, I'd laughed out loud multiple times and enjoyed what felt most like an extended comedy skit rather than a superhero movie full of nerdy superhero details to geek out on (it is that, but it is possible to ignore it)..

★★★☆☆

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Dangerous Animals (2025)

As if to demonstrate the abyssmal depths to which film has sunk, this serial killer thriller and creature-feature mash-up, about an Australian serial killer who feeds foreign tourists to sharks, is built up around its thirty-minute-mark spectacle of a woman being torn to pieces by a shark, and nothing else matters:, the plot, very possibly spat out by Chatgpt, starts with a thoroughly unclever and utterly unrewarding opening sequence, then features disappearing bodies, plastic shiv neck injuries and knife wounds that are shaken off and disappear, plot lurches that defy logic, and a lot of repetitive catch-and-escape, catch-and-escape sequences - Tom and Jerry cartoons are more entertaining and efficient - and chaining the film industry to its watery grave forever at the bottom of the ocean is the fact mind-numbed audiences have given this prosaic nonsense an 86% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

★★☆☆☆

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The Teacher's Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer) (2023)

I love movies about school - school is such a perfect hotbed of issues - and this German film is a ripper with Leonie Benesch perfect as the fresh-faced and idealistic teacher who sees all her hard work creating a harmonious classroom environment undone when speculation runs rife through the school campus that one of their own is a thief.

★★★★☆

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Un Flic (Eng: 'A Cop') (aka Dirty Money) (1972)

All those Mission Impossible movies owe a lot to Jean-Pierre Melville's last French crime "flic" that features a centrepiece stunt distinctly Ethan Hunt in style involving a train and a helicopter...oh, and a cigar robe, a white pencil, and a horseshoe magnet (far too much detail: couldn't he have just gone into the bathroom and reappeared changed?) but unlike the Mission: Impossible movies, which plotwise are pretty straightforward, you'll need to watch Un Flic ("A cop") twice to confirm what might not be clear the first time through: that Alan Delon is a police commissioner, that apart from being committed by the same criminal gang, a drug robbery is a second crime unrelated to the first, and a second watch will help you to distinguish between far too many grey-faced trenchcoats and blonde bombshells, all of them (the bombshells AND the trenchcoats) mesmerized, transfixed by Delon.

★★★☆☆

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Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (2023)

D&D, that role-playing game enjoyed by unwashed geeks sitting for days at a table talking about charisma points and elvin lore, is adapted in this movie with Chris Pine - charming as always - playing the roguish leader of a misfit band of thieves who must traverse wild monster-strewn landscapes collecting magical items to help them overcome some wizards hellbent on fantasy-world domination, and it is a funny and fresh adventure, and you do not need to be a fantasy-loving unwashed geek to thoroughly enjoy it.

★★★★☆

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Death At An Old Mansion (本陣殺人事件) (1975)

It seems strange to stay completely faithful to the plot of Seishi Yokomizo's detective novel The Honjin Murders yet change the title so no one who has read the book can easily find this adaptation, but I suppose Death At An Old Mansion dispenses with the archaic and unhelpful concept of a honjin and provides a more atmospheric English title better suited to this 1975 adaptation's giallo stylings - in good part a horror movie, chilling at times, but also an effective telling of Yokomizo's classic Japanese locked room murder mystery inspired by Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room.

★★★★☆

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Murder to the Tune of the Seven Black Notes (aka 'Death Tolls Seven Times', 'Seven Notes in Black', 'The Psychic') (1977)

When a skeleton is unearthed at her husband's countryside manor, it becomes apparent a woman's visions of murder are not simply her imagination, in this excellent murder mystery for giallo fans featuring ghastly body horror set-pieces, opulent interiors, dread accompanied by Hammond organ, intrigue, and lots of luridly coloured blood.

★★★★☆

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Doc Hollywood (1991)

The appeal of this comedy escaped me when I was in high school and all around me were lauding its praises, and now, having watched it again in 2023, I feel vindicated - again left cold, not amused by a city doctor's court-ordered stint in a rural backwater where he prattles with only personality-free hicks and embarks on a brittle romance. 

★★☆☆☆

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D.O.A. (1950)

The popwhistle sound effect every time a woman walks past is a disconcerting detail in this otherwise engrossing film noir classic about Frank Bigelow, an accountant and Lothario who has short time to investigate when a slow poisoner "murders" him.

★★★☆☆

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Death On The Nile (2022)

Kenneth Brannagh does a much better job with his adaptation of Agatha Christie's Death On The Nile than he did with his Murder On The Orient Express in 2019, but patchy acting (from Annette Bening, especially, and from Russell Brand, too, on the few occasions he is permitted to speak), wonky cartoony cgi environments, some important clues that couldn't be more clanging if they were delivered by a town herald, and some perverse embellishments to Christie's story (that absurd dancing, and that moustache backstory!) keep this from being a great or, given the excellent 1978 adaptation, even a necessary remake.

★★★☆☆

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Dune (1984)

This 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert's dense and difficult 800-page read was at one point ten to fourteen hours of footage that over the course of director David Lynch's famously difficult production, was pared down to just two, and the result is laughable, with glib voiceovers bridging those lost hours on the cutting-room floor and mere sentences attempting to confer importance on too many details - too many feudal empires and ruling families warring over a precious resource on the planet Arrakis - but nonetheless the movie succeeds as a psychedelic rock opera full of fantastic SFX (a floating bloated villain, gleaming hyper-blue eyes, gigantic earthworms, yellow upside-down lightning) all set to a Toto-and-Brian Eno soundtrack, a heady, mind-numbing treat bringing to mind the camp excess and pulp spectacle of Flash Gordon - for better or worse.

★★★☆☆

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Dracula 2000 (2000)

Risen by elaborate means from a treasure vault in modern-day America, Gerard Butler's Dracula is an almost entirely non-verbal ponce whose exhilaration at the sight of ripe virginal necks looks like constipation, but this Wes Craven-endorsed exercise in horror, featuring Christopher Plummer as a Van Helsing descendant, Jonny Lee Miller as geeky-chicy muscle, and Justine Waddell as a woman with a supernatural bond to the ancient bloodsucker, is so-bad-it's-not-so-bad mindless horror-action fun.

★★★☆☆

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