| Dan in Real Life |
Dan and his three daughters--car-happy 17-year-old Jane (Alison Pill), lovestruck 14-year-old Cara (Brittany Robertson), and amiable 9-year-old Lilly (Marlene Lawston)--pile into his station wagon ...
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| Dancer in the Dark [DVD] |
After its premier at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, where it eventually won the coveted
Palm d'or, Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark was met equally with intense
celebratory applause and ...
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| Dancer, Texas Pop. 81 |
While there will likely be comparisons of "Dancer, Texas" to "The Last Picture Show" (1971), any similarities between the two movies are actually quite scarce. In fact, aside from the fact that they ...
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| Danger: Diabolik [DVD] |
The film was based on a popular series of fumetti (Italian comic books) that began in 1962. Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis got ahold of the rights at just the right time when Europe was ...
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| Dangerous Beauty |
The film takes place during the Renaissance, a time when Venice was the pleasure capital of Europe. At this time, Venice was its own republic, and it thrived on being the central juncture of ...
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| Danton [DVD] |
In Danton Wajda cannily uses the French Revolution as a surface narrative for his exploration of the nature of freedom, justice, and true participatory government. It is not surprising that ...
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| Daredevil |
Movies about superheroes don’t often have moody voice-over narration, but then again, most movie superheroes aren’t nearly as angst-ridden as the vigilante Daredevil. In keeping with the ...
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| Dark Blue |
Dark Blue is a tough, but somewhat routine, corrupt-cop morality tale that generates a good deal of power by being set in the five-day period in 1992 leading up to the riots that tore apart ...
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| Dark City |
This is the basic question underlying Alex Proyas' ambitious new thriller, "Dark City." Part film noir, part science fiction, part fantasy, and part psychotic dreamscape, "Dark City" is a visual ...
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| Dark Water |
In fact, the most horrific thing about Dark Water is the plumbing. Anyone who has ever been forced by financial straits to move into a less-than-exciting apartment will immediately empathize ...
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| Date Night [Blu-Ray] |
Having already helmed Cheaper by the Dozen (2003), The Pink Panther (2006), and both Night at the Museum movies, director Shawn Levy has staked his career on choreographing ...
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| Dave Chappelle's Block Party |
Even in the here and now, though, without the guaranteed stamp of lasting historical importance, Block Party is an exhilarating, deliriously alive documentary. Directed by Michel Gondry ...
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| Dawn of the Dead (1978) [DVD] |
Whereas Night of the Living Dead was shot in black and white on 16mm, giving it a grainy, pseudo-documentary aesthetic that made its fantastical story of the dead returning to life seem very ...
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| Dawn of the Dead (2004) |
>
The only things that George A. Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead and ...
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| Day of the Dead [DVD] |
After the midnight-movie success of his groundbreaking horror masterpiece Night of the Living Dead (1968), writer/director George A. Romero spent much of the 1970s trying to get out from ...
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| Day of Wrath (Vredens dag) [DVD] |
> When Day of Wrath (Vredens dag) was released in 1943, its ...
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| Days of Heaven [DVD] |
Like his other films, Days of Heaven is more poem than story, and Malick is infinitely more interested in evoking feelings than conveying narrative information. There is a consistency to ...
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| Days of Thunder [Blu-Ray] |
While Cruise’s hair is longer and he’s a little rougher around the edges, his rookie racecar driver Cole Trickle is essentially an earthbound variation on Top Gun’s Maverick. However, ...
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| Dazed and Confused [DVD] |
Linklater was himself a product of the 1970s, and he views the era not with the ironic disdain of a posturing postmodernist, but rather with the keen eye of an anthropologist. He understands and ...
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| Dead Again [DVD] |
With a sudden crash of shrieking strings, the word "MURDER" from a yellowing newspaper headline quickly fills the screen then fades away, making clear from its opening moments exactly what ...
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| Dead Man Walking |
And so feel most opponents of the death penalty, including Tim Robbins, the writer-director of "Dead Man Walking," one of the first films to openly tackle this issue. But you wouldn't know Robbins' ...
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| Death at a Funeral |
Not having seen the British original, I can’t comment on how the two films compare, but I have a hard time imagining that playwright-turned-director Neil LaBute, whose best films also tend to be ...
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| Death of a Cyclist (Muerte de un ciclista) [DVD] |
The immediate inspiration for the film was Italian neorealism, which Bardem and other Spanish filmmakers saw as a meaningful aesthetic approach to dealing with the here and now. Bardem sought to ...
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| Death Race |
The story takes place in the very near future (2012, to be exact), where the U.S. economy has collapsed, unemployment is sky high, and the crime rate has become so astronomical that the government ...
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| Death Sentence |
The film is loosely based on a 1976 novel of the same name by Brian Garfield, a prolific novelist and screenwriter who, having penned the novel on which Michael Winner's Death Wish (1974) ...
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| Death to Smoochy |
Death to Smoochy is a gale force of energy and creativity in the service of a lame idea. Simply put, if you've ever watched The Simpsons and laughed at the none-too-subtle social ...
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| Death Wish [DVD] |
There is something undeniably appealing about Michael Winner's Death Wish. Even
those who disagree with its knee-jerk vigilante ideology have a hard time denying its impact
because the film ...
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| Deconstructing Harry |
And now, after writing and directing more than 25 movies, he has offered quite possibly his most personal work to date, "Deconstructing Harry," which also happens to showcase Allen as his most savage ...
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| Deep Blue Sea |
There is one particularly memorable moment in "Deep Blue Sea," a water-soaked action-adventure flick about genetically altered sharks hunting scientists in an underwater laboratory. The scene takes ...
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| Deep Impact |
All those involved with "Deep Impact" have sworn up and down for the last couple of weeks that their film is drastically different than "Armageddon" will be. They insist that "Deep Impact" is really ...
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| Deep Red (Profondo rosso) [DVD] |
"Deep Red" ("Profondo rosso") was Dario Argento's transition film, the bridge between his earlier trilogy of giallo films (Italian murder
mysteries) and his later output of supernatural horror. It ...
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| Deep Rising |
The movie stars the struggling Treat Williams as John Finnegan, a mercenary boat captain of some kind. For a price, he and his crew will take anyone anywhere. Finnegan's policy is, "If you got the ...
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| Defiance |
The story begins with the Nazi invasion of Belorussia in 1941, which lies just beneath Lithuania and was then a part of the Soviet Union. The four Bielski brothers--Tuvia (Daniel Craig), who is the ...
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| Demon Seed |
Looking at the film twenty years later, "Demon Seed" still has some far-out notions, but much of it has indeed become reality. IBM's Deep Blue has proved that a computer can "think" better than the ...
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| Derailed |
Clive Owen brings a brooding smolder to the role of Charles Schine, Chicago ad executive who meets another married executive, Lucinda Harris (Jennifer Aniston), on the commuter train into work one ...
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| Desecration [DVD] |
It comes as little surprise that first-time feature director Dante Tomaselli admires German
director F.W. Murnau, who is best known for helping to introduce expressionism into the
horror genre with ...
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| Desperate Living [DVD] |
By the time writer/director John Waters made Desperate Living in 1977, he was already a notorious midnight-movie cult celebrity, a genuine fringe iconoclastic auteur whose ...
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| Desperate Measures |
It is rare that I would ever complain about the opening credits getting on my nerves, but whoever designed this sequence for "Desperate Measures" needs to have his head examined. During the whole ...
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| Despicable Me |
It is fitting that Despicable Me’s funniest element is a haphazard collection of pint-sized clowns since the movie itself is a similarly haphazard collection of espionage parody and ...
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| Devil's Advocate |
This is the premise of "Devil's Advocate," a stylish and entertaining new thriller that has the bold sense to plop Al Pacino in the shoes of the Satan himself. Cackling and leering, Pacino puts on a ...
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| Diary of a Chambermaid (Le Journal d'une femme de chambre) [DVD] |
Luis Buñuel's Diary of a Chambermaid (Le Journal d'une femme de
chambre) is not one of his better-known or his best films. But, it is a fascinatingly
bizarre minor work, a ...
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| Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de campagne) [DVD] |
Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de campagne) is a film about anguish, both physical and spiritual. Like so many of Bresson’s films, it features a ...
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| Diary of a Mad Black Woman |
I agree that the comedy in Diary of a Mad Black Woman is deliriously over-the-top; it’s crude, crass, and often hilarious. However, what I don’t see is the drama as being so ...
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| Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star |
Like so many movies by graduates from Saturday Night Live, Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star is much funnier in its conception than in its execution. The idea seems perfect, especially ...
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| Die Another Day |
Forty years and 20 “official” movies later, James Bond is still at it. In the longest-running franchise in movie history, we have seen British special agent 007 escape from virtually every ...
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| Dillinger Is Dead (Dillinger è morto) [DVD] |
Despite producing 33 feature films in four decades, an impressive cinematic output that is enhanced by his work as a producer and collaborator on other projects, the majority of Ferreri’s films ...
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| Dinner for Schmucks |
Carell stars as Barry, a bespectacled dweeb of questionable intelligence whose passion is making intricate dioramas starring stuffed mice. Barry is clearly a kind-hearted guy, so much so that when ...
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| Dinosaur |
Contrary to claims of the obvious, "Dinosaur" is not a movie. Rather, it is an 82-minute demo reel that illustrates the wondrous possibilities of three-dimensional computer animation. It arrives, ...
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| District 9 [Blu-Ray] |
The film takes place in an alternate present tense that has been indelibly shaped by the arrival 20 years earlier of a massive spaceship that descended from the sky and then stalled out just above ...
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| Disturbia [DVD] |
Kale's voyeurism-as-boredom-cure covers his entire suburban street, at first uncovering little more than adultery and obsessive yard mowing. However, his sights are soon set on the cute, ...
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| Disturbing Behavior |
This is not to mention the fact that--like far too many recent movies--"Disturbing Behavior" has that slick, music video polish where everything is heavy with thick color tones, broken beams of ...
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| Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood |
As a Southern-fried tale of teary mother-daughter redemption, Callie Khouri's Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood strikes a few resounding notes of truth. Unfortunately, those notes of ...
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| Divorce Italian Style (Divorzio all'italiana) [DVD] |
Ferdinando is a Sicilian baron who, by dent of his powerful family, does not need a job and therefore spends his days hanging around the familial palace. His wife, Rosalia (Daniela Rocca), is loving ...
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| Django |
From the start, it is clear that "Django" is not a traditional Western. The film opens with long shots of the titular character moving across a rugged Western landscape while the soundtrack is ...
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| Doctor Dolittle |
In the titular role as the doctor who hears and responds to the call of the wild, Eddie Murphy, once the King of Profanity and every parent's worst nightmare, continues on his slow turn toward more ...
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| Dodes'ka-den [DVD] |
Based on a collection of stories by Shugoro Yamamoto (whose works were also the basis of Kurosawa’s Sanjuro and Red Beard), Dodes’ka-den has no central plot or protagonist, ...
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| Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story [DVD] |
Of course, one of the things that’s funny about Dodgeball (besides the sight of seeing people being constantly pelted with dodgeballs, among other things) is the way in which it shows that ...
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| Dogma |
If only there were more movies like "Dogma."
Writer/director Kevin Smith's controversial and (lest it be
forgotten in the ensuing uproar) hilarious new comedy is a
smart, bold, wildly imaginative and ...
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| Dogville |
Lars von Trier’s Dogville is aesthetically sparse and thematically audacious, the searing work of a genuine provocateur. Von Trier is a filmmaker who elicits as much wild praise as he does ...
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| Domino |
Tatted up, with her hair cut off, and wearing tons of eye make-up, Keira Knightley certainly fits the part of a good-girl-gone-bad. The script by Richard Kelly (writer/director of the cult fave ...
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| Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman (Si Don Juan était une femme) [DVD] |
Roger Vadim's Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman (Si Don Juan était une femme) is one of those projects that has an interesting core idea, but fails to come together into a good ...
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| Don McKay [Blu-Ray] |
The titular character, played with stoic world-weariness by Thomas Haden Church, is a high school janitor living in Boston. One day, he receives a letter, and while the contents of it are not ...
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| Don't Look Now [DVD] |
Nicolas Roeg's intimate, fractured horror film Don't Look Now begins with what can only be described as a brilliant opening sequence. ...
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| Don't Mess With My Sister! [DVD] |
Writer/director Meir Zarchi has made two films in his lifetime. The first, 1978's I Spit
On Your Grave (aka, Day of the Woman), is one of the most notorious
exploitation films of all ...
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| Donnie Brasco |
This stunning film tells the amazing story of Joe Pistone (Johnny Depp), an FBI agent who spent almost six years -- from 1976 to 1981 -- working undercover in the New York Mafia under the alias ...
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| Donnie Darko [DVD] |
The titular character of 26-year-old Richard Kelly's feature debut Donnie Darko is a fascinating enigma—a troubled suburban teen with dark eyes and a morbid sense of humor who may or may ...
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| Doomsday |
Hence, we have Doomsday, an ’80s-style B-movie mash-up that starts out as another plague-wiping-out-much-of-the-human-population scenario with a few bits cribbed from Escape From New ...
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| Double Jeopardy [DVD] |
"Double Jeopardy" offers a twist on the well-known Hitchcock formula of the wrongly accused man evading the law in order to prove his innocence. The movie, a shiny Hollywood product directed by ...
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| Double Suicide (Shinju ten no amijima) [DVD] |
Much like the teenage lovers in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the adult
lovers in Masahiro Shinoda's Double Suicide (Shinju ten no amijima)
find that their love for ...
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| Doubt |
The film follows the play’s basic narrative structure, which revolves around a carefully escalating battle of wills between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn. The spark that ignites the blaze comes ...
|
| Down by Law [DVD] |
In Jim Jarmusch’s minimalist comedy Down by Law, three men are stuck in a prison cell together, two of whom are so much alike that they immediately hate each other, and the third of whom ...
|
| Down With Love |
Credit should be given where credit is due: In Down With Love, director Peyton Reed (Bring It On) and his production design team have done a meticulous job of recreating the ...
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| Downfall (Der untergang) |
This is the subject of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s harrowing Downfall (Der untergang), which is the first mainstream German-produced film to tackle the subject of Hitler in more than half ...
|
| Downhill Racer [DVD] |
This is the only imaginable explanation for why Paramount chief honcho Charles Bluhdorn entrusted even this relatively low-budgeted project to actor Robert Redford, who was certainly a rising star, ...
|
| Dr. Dolittle 2 |
Dr. Dolittle 2 is much like its 1998 predecessor, in that it is enjoyably silly, though notparticularly inventive, and it is clean enough for most kids (I don't think there was a single curse ...
|
| Dr. No [DVD] |
Dr. No was actually the sixth of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, which he proficiently kicked out at the pace of roughly one per year starting with 1953’s Casino Royale until his death ...
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| Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas |
In his original children's book, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the prolificTheodor S. Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) explained the Grinch's rather grouchy behavior in onlythe vaguest of terms. ...
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| Dr. T and the Women |
Over the last three years, director Robert Altman's films have been slowly winding theirway through the South, from Savannah, Georgia (1998's The Gingerbread Man) toHolly Springs, Mississippi ...
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| Drag Me to Hell |
Alison Lohman stars as Christine Brown, a young woman who has worked her way up the social ladder from overweight Midwestern farm girl to stylish loan officer at a California bank with an eye on the ...
|
| Dragonfly [DVD] |
Dragonfly is a silly--though it takes itself very seriously--supernatural mystery-thriller about a man who believes his recently deceased wife is trying to communicate with him from ...
|
| Dragonslayer [DVD] |
With the exception of the thunderous success of The Lord of the Rings films during the past few years, sword-and-sorcery-style fantasy movies have been woefully out of vogue and received with ...
|
| Dreamcatcher |
I have the feeling that if Stephen King wrote a book about toilet paper, someone would try to make a movie about it. At this point, King’s novels, short stories, or original screenplays have been ...
|
| Dreamgirls |
Part of this is not so much the fault of the material as it is the times in which that material is being mounted. Our scandal-rag-fueled culture of infotainment is so awash in news about celebrity ...
|
| Dressed to Kill [DVD] |
Few movies have become lightning rods for the kind of intense, focused public controversy that swirled around Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill when it was released during the summer of 1980. ...
|
| Driven |
As an action movie, Renny Harlin's Driven isn't very good. It isn't very good as ahuman drama, either. But, as a thinly disguised allegory for the fading career of action starSylvester ...
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| Drop Dead Gorgeous |
It's always a sad sight when a satire goes after a painfully obvious and easy target, and still manages to miss the mark. Such is the case with "Drop Dead Gorgeous," a vicious black comedy about a ...
|
| Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi) [DVD] |
There is little in the way of idealization in Drunken Angel, which takes place in the slums of postwar Tokyo and focuses the dregs of society--both the impoverished and the criminals who feed ...
|
| Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd |
As far as my understanding of it goes, the purpose of a prequel is to deepen and enrich the meaning of the first film by showing what happened beforehand. Whereas a sequel takes the story further ...
|
| Dune |
Instead, Lynch tried to condense the novel, keeping the main plot intact, but leaving out certain characters and squeezing events together. For those who have read the book, "Dune" the movie will be ...
|
| Dungeons & Dragons |
Dungeons & Dragons is a dark, ugly fantasy movie that takes its name from the
role-playing game that first gained popularity among unpopular teenage boys two decades
ago. The game really has ...
|
| Duplicity |
The story in Duplicity is told in a fragmented mosaic, with the present tense narrative constantly being interrupted by lengthy flashbacks that both expand on the characters and also make ...
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