Films beginning with D

Dancer in the Dark
(Lars Von Trier, 2000)
Devastating and exhilarating in equal measure, Von Trier shreds our emotions into mince with this distinctly dreamlike collapse of one woman's American dream. It showcases an extraordinary tour de force debut by Björk as the innocent east European dreamer who dances through life as if in a Hollywood musical, until the magic decays alongside her failing eyesight.

Dangerous Liaisons
(Stephen Frears, 1988)
Christopher Hampton's adaptation of the De Laclos novel about seduction and revenge among the decadent French aristocracy was elegant, sexy and refined. Glenn Close and John Malkovich found perhaps the most satisfying roles of their careers as the jaded epicures who stave off ennui with a sexual wager.

Danton
(Andrzej Wajda, 1983)
Arguably the finest cinematic treatment of the French revolution, from a Polish director fresh from the Solidarity struggles in his homeland. Gerard Depardieu makes for a suitably imposing incarnation of the revolutionary ideologue, duelling impressively with Wojciech Pszoniak's Robespierre.

Dark Star
(John Carpenter, 1974)
Carpenter's genre-savvy dissertation project at UCLA somehow indirectly gave birth to the sci-fi boom. Here is that boom in a stoner/surfer/hey-mister-spaceman embryo: a brain-dead mission leader, a pilot who dreams of the Perfect Wave, and history's most mischievous and menacing Space Hopper. The anti-Silent Running.

Darling
(John Schlesinger, 1965)
Intelligently scripted by Frederic Raphael, this satire of swinging London may seem a little heavy-handed today, but there's no denying Julie Christie's star power. Gorgeous and charismatic, she breathes real life and sympathy into her shallow good-time girl.

Day for Night
(François Truffaut, 1973)
Often regarded as the best film about film-making ever made. Truffaut himself stars as the harassed, haggard director who is stuck making a brassy romance-drama called Meet Pamela. On location, he has to keep everybody happy: Jacqueline Bisset is the beautiful female lead; Jean-Pierre Léaud is the lovestruck actor with a crush.

The Day the Earth Stood Still
(Robert Wise, 1951)
Sci-fi message-movie that explicitly takes aim at cold war paranoia, as eight-foot alien robot Gort descends from the skies to warn humanity against the evil of nuclear weapons. Notwithstanding cheapo 50s special effects, it's held together by an overpowering earnestness that belied its lowly status.

Days of Being Wild
(Wong Kar-Wai, 1991)
A chain reaction of romance that reverberates around 60s Hong Kong is kicked off by a drunken ex-hooker's confession. Days of Being Wild saw the first bright sparks of lionised style-merchant Wong Kar-Wai: he manages to be both new-wave fresh and mesmerisingly nostalgic, a conflicted match for characters bearing tear-stained memories in the maelstrom of city life.

Days of Heaven
(Terrence Malick, 1978)
Shot entirely at the "magic hour", this lovers' tragedy is bathed in golden twilight and grounded by a world-weary child's narration. Even amid the flames and violence of its late scenes, the movie seems elusive and somehow unreal - like a dream confused with a memory, or a memory confused with a dream.

Dazed and Confused
(Richard Linklater, 1993)
Linklater's beloved coming-of-age comedy shows the director's singular gift for the free-associative sidewinding of conversation, which here is given shape and momentum on the last day of high school in 1976. The one-liners are priceless and the period soundtrack is expertly curated.

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
(Carl Reiner, 1982)
Mind-boggling technical achievements are at the heart of Carl Reiner's uproarious spoof of film noir, integrating footage from classics of the 40s to put Steve Martin's idiot detective in the frame with figures as diverse as Bogart, Cagney, Ray Milland, Bette Davis, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Ava Gardner.

Dead of Night
(Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer, 1945)
With four directors handling five stories, this was one of the first and best of the compendium horror films. As a whole, it's a little uneven in tone, but the weaker stories only appear so next to the two classics on show here: a gothic chiller concerning a haunted mirror and Michael Redgrave's tour-de-force as a ventriloquist struggling to keep his dummy in line.

Dead Presidents
(Albert Hughes, 1995)
After their calling-card gangsta drama Menace II Society, the Hughes brothers turned up the heat with this retro heist movie that kicks off in the Bronx in 1968 but takes a turn for the hellish when its charismatic lead (Lorenzo Tate) finds himself in 'nam. From here, the Hugheses create a harsh but credible morality tale, as much about the US government's abandonment of returning black soldiers as the issue of crime and punishment.

Dead Ringers
(David Cronenberg, 1988)
Anticipating his more recent films, Cronenberg made a step away from vicous body horror, here crafting a thoroughly disturbing tale of twin gynaecologists (Jeremy Irons x2) who swap lives and lovers at will. Without overt show, Cronenberg builds a terrifying atmosphere of violence, the doctors' gruesome gynaecological instruments like a relief impression of a deviant and damaged psychology.

Dear Diary
(Nanni Moretti, 1993)
In which Nanni Moretti scoots around Rome on a Vespa, goes sightseeing on the islands off Sicily, has treatment for cancer (thankfully curable) and meets Jennifer Beals. The director-star's comic-sarcastic persona treads a fine line between clever and irritating, but in the end you will be charmed.

Death In Venice
(Luchino Visconti, 1971)
Ill winds blow through the sinking city in Visconti's high-art tale of disease and desire, with Dirk Bogarde as an ailing, dispirited composer taking a recuperative holiday in Venice and falling into a forbidden infatuation. A grandiloquent portrait of an artist, a man, and a whole city in crisis, it drips ardour and subtext from every burnished frame.

The Decline of Western Civilisation Part II: the Metal Years
(Penelope Spheeris, 1981)
Hilarious and often incredibly sad look at the hair metal scene in Los Angeles. Spheeris supplies the rope and the deluded musicians are all too eager to hang themselves. It introduced Ozzy's clownish persona, had WASP's Chris Holmes achieving Olympic levels of onscreen drunken-ness, and provided loser rockers Odin with their moment in the sun.

The Deer Hunter
(Michael Cimino, 1978)
Along with Apocalypse Now, this shattering film remains American cinema's most monumental attempt to take on the legacy of the Vietnam war. Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep and John Cazale are all mesmerising as the small-towners affected in different ways by the conflict.

Deliverance
(John Boorman, 1972)
The greenest (in politics and colour-palate) of Boorman's many green-hued movies (see Excalibur, The Emerald Forest), Deliverance sees nature, long violated by man, repaying the favour as four river-rafting Atlanta suburbanites find their manhood severely tested. The riverside rape of Ned Beatty is Boorman's Psycho shower sequence: horrifying and indelible.

Desperately Seeking Susan
(Susan Seidelman, 1985)
A bored New Jersey housewife decides to add spark to her life by inserting herself into an ongoing personal-ads drama in Susan Seidelman's delightful mistaken-identity comedy. Added perks are the glimpses of the funky, pre-gentrification East Village and Madonna in her mid-80s glory: teased hair and underwear-as-outerwear.

Detour
(Edgar G Ulmer, 1945)
All the Z-movie superlatives are called for here: the shortest, bleakest, most pessimistic, cheapest, fastest-filmed, most pared-down and despairing road trip to the end of the night. Ever. Tom Neal and the spectacularly malevolent Ann Savage leave, by hazard or design, a trail of corpses in their wake in Ulmer's expressionistic nightmare in monochromes.

Devdas
(Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2002)
The most expensive Bollywood movie ever made, Indian cinema's third version of Devdas took the original plot (Romeo and Juliet plus added family rivalry and alcoholism) and topped it with extra doses of silk, sequins and dance sequences. Though former Miss World Aishwarya Rai gets top billing, it's Madhuri Dixit's femme fatale who steals the show.

Devil in a Blue Dress
(Carl Franklin, 1995)
Franklin meticulously and sensitively recreates the lost African-American semi-Eden of 1940s south-central Los Angeles in this slow-burning neo-noir adaptation of Walter Mosley's first Easy Rawlins novel. It's a tale of murder, political corruption, betrayal and child molestation; a perfectly cast Denzel Washington is almost outshone by Don Cheadle's amiably psychopathic buddy Mouse.

The Devils
(Ken Russell, 1971) The knee-jerk controversy that surrounded this may have long faded, but the film's power hasn't diminished at all. In an adaptation of Aldous Huxley, Russell captures the frenzied hysteria of a (literal) witch-hunt and the grotesquery of torture, amid some incredibly stylish Derek Jarman-designed sets. A timeless tale of injustice.

Les Diaboliques
(Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955)
When a sadistic headmaster is drowned in a bathtub by his wife and former mistress, a phoney suicide plot is thwarted when his body mysteriously disappears. Clouzot's sombre portrait of murder in a provincial village remains a classic in Hitchcock-style suspense with a nifty shocker ending.

Diary of a Country Priest
(Robert Bresson, 1951)
Sombre portrait of an ailing young churchman who arrives in a village parish, where he's met only with indifference. Bresson's lesson on spiritual salvation is decidedly austere but powerful.

Dick Tracy
(Warren Beatty, 1990)
Beatty's "comeback" after the legendary flop of Ishtar. He looked set for another blunder by taking the lead role in an expensive movie about a comic book character few kids of the time would have known anything about - with box office kiss-of-death Madonna in tow. It actually works, using a six-colour palette and prosthetics-covered turns from Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman. It's like a family version of Sin City.

Die Hard
(John McTiernan, 1988)
Released when action heroes were almost exclusively pumped-up supermen like Arnold and Sly, Bruce Willis provided a much-needed alternative. His John McLane was worn down and cynical rather than merely blankly sarcastic. He also took several severe beatings. Alan Rickman's consummate turn as the lead terrorist guaranteed RSC actors a fat paycheque as Hollywood villains for decades to come.

Dig!
(Ondi Timoner, 2004)
One scene, two bands: multimillion-selling Vodafone sales-reps the Dandy Warhols, and heroically combustible junkie-rock outfit the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Timoner traces the bifurcation of former musical allies with caustic wit in a gripping look at artistic politics - largely thanks to Jonestown frontman Anton Newcombe, a one-man reality show.

Diner
(Barry Levinson, 1982)
American Graffiti for grown-ups, or rather for men afraid of growing up. Five Baltimore friends contemplate impending adulthood - warily, drunkenly, bitterly - in the last week of 1958, as the least mature of them prepares to wed. Barry Levinson's first, most personal and still his funniest, wisest, most perfect movie.

Dirty Dancing
(Emile Ardolino, 1987)
Like Top Gun, Dirty Dancing has overcome the 1980s high-concept pigeonhole and become something greater than itself: a pop-culture fable. Rewind it for transcendental soundtracked sequences, genuine chemistry between Jennifer Grey's ingénue Baby and Patrick Swayze's Johnny, and the soft-focus background against which Swayze could usefully reinvent himself in Donnie Darko as proprietor of a "kiddie porn dungeon".

The Dirty Dozen
(Robert Aldrich, 1967)
This war movie offers a different take on heroism. Here it's not born from patriotism but from desperation, as a team of nothing-to-lose criminals are sent on a suicide mission behind enemy lines. They certainly are dirty too, throwing petrol and grenades into a roomful of Germans has to one of the coldest moments of any world war two flick, and possibly one of the most honest.

Dirty Harry
(Don Siegel, 1971)
Clint Eastwood gleefully tore out pages and pages of needless dialogue to create the pared-down anti-hero Harry Callahan. His history and motivation are barely alluded to, but his distaste for authority and red tape is written on every wrinkle of his craggy face. Faced with a villain based on the Zodiac killer, Harry refuses to have his hands tied by such petty concerns as the human rights of his suspect.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
(Frank Oz, 1988)
Michael Caine and Steve Martin star as rival conmen working a variety of escalating scams on the French Riviera in a broad comedy that lets them both play to their strengths. Packed with well-timed physical gags and one-liners, this is a film that is as fun to watch as it must have been to make.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
(Luis Buñuel, 1972)

Buñuel was never an artist who needed big budgets - asked once what he'd do with $5m, he said he'd still make a $500,000 movie - but after 1960 he moved back to Europe from his Mexican exile, and for the first time in his career was able to work unencumbered, and often. Thus we were afforded one of the great late flowerings of cinema: the mature Don Luis in all his spiky, mordant glory, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie may prove his most enduring late masterpiece. It's a kind of reversal of the situation of The Exterminating Angel (1962). There, guests at a dinner party are terrified to leave, for reasons that are never clear; here, six people keep trying to dine together, but something always prevents them. Like all of his movies, from Un Chien Andalou onwards, Charm is wide open to the notion of dream-logic, and moves smoothly from character to character through successive nightmares, until it's difficult to tell where reality ends and crazed reverie begins. The key to Buñuel is that he is as interested in the logic as in the dream, and the movie proceeds in remarkably orderly and clear-sighted fashion into realms of fantasy that never seem forced or preposterous, no matter how many torturers, tyrants or terrorists show up. At this stage of his career, Buñuel commanded immense respect among performers, and he was able here to gather the cream of 1970s French cinema: Stephane Audran, Delphine Seyrig, Bulle Ogier, and best of all, Fernando Rey.

John Patterson

Distant Voices, Still Lives
(Terence Davies, 1988)
Davies' primal, poetic reimagining of his Liverpool childhood marked him out as one of British cinema's brightest talents. Two decades later, the funding has dried up and the backers have gone elsewhere. All of which only serves to make Distant Voices seem all the more tragic, and precious.

Diva
(Jean-Jacques Beneix, 1981)
Stylishly convoluted 1980s cult thriller, set in Paris, about a stew of quirky characters including gangsters, cops, and an opera-loving mailman whose passion for an American diva leads to a strange twist of events. A new wave-inspired romp of noir-ish suspense, filmed in lush Technicolor.

Django
(Sergio Corbucci, 1966)
Banned in the UK for its extreme (for 1966) violence, Django remains the Corbucci film that most convincingly stakes his claim to being the silver medallist of spaghetti westerns. Franco Nero drags around a coffin full of machine-guns and wreaks his bloody vengeance on, well, everyone.

Do the Right Thing
(Spike Lee, 1989)
Racial tensions in a Brooklyn neighbourhood combust on a sweltering summer's day in a movie that gets audiences as hot and bothered as its characters. A powerful tragedy about a community caught in the throes of mutual suspicion, the film is diagnosis, reportage, and prophecy.

Dodgeball
(Rawson Marshall Thurber, 2004)
"He's ball-less, Cotton!" Dodgeball-less, that is. The funniest, stupidest sports comedy in years is chockablock with transcendently dirty jokes and one-liners, crowded with masterful moron-cameos from persons as diverse as wrench-hurling coach Rip Torn, idiot-savant commentator Jason Bateman and (wha...?) Lance Armstrong. More belly laughs than the average viewer can handle without throwing up.

Dog Day Afternoon
(Sidney Lumet, 1975)
"Attica! Attica!" The Al Pacino movie where you never forget how short he is. He's The Little Man robbing The Man's bank, with useless co-conspirators like John Cazale (think of the career he might have had), to finance his lover's sex-change. This is Lumet's dirty New York at its most absurd and poignant.

Dogtown & Z Boys
(Stacy Peralta, 2001)
Stylish and inspirational account of the latchkey kids from Santa Monica who stormed the backyard pools of the rich and famous, drained them, and invented skateboarding's "aerial" moves. Full of renegade charm and marvellously evocative archive footage, the film oozes that priceless subculture commodity: authenticity.

Dogville
(Lars Von Trier, 2003)
The wind of change that Dogme ushered in emerged as full-blown Brechtian alienation in Dogville, a schematic floorplan standing in for the Colorado town in which Nicole Kidman's harried Grace takes refuge. Von Trier prods and provokes with his sententious view of America, but this presiding archness, against the bare stage, produces super-invigorating drama.

La Dolce Vita
(Federico Fellini, 1960)
Fellini's grand statement on the emptiness at the heart of the Italian postwar economic miracle has become one of the era's defining films: ravishing to look at, filled with iconic faces and places, and brilliantly modulated for every minute of its three-hour running time. Rarely has spiritual desolation appeared so enticing.

Don't Look Back
(DA Pennebaker, 1967)
Legend-building portrait of a 23-year-old Bob Dylan hitting London for a pivotal UK tour. His bemused reactions to the fusty British press's painfully unhip questioning are priceless, and there's also Joan Baez, that iconic Subterranean Homesick Blues card-flipping clip, and plenty of signs that show, yeah, he really was pretty special.

Don't Look Now
(Nicolas Roeg, 1973)
A small figure in a red coat making its way along narrow passageways and foggy canals is just one of the memorable gothic motifs that make up this elliptical horror, adapted from a story by Daphne du Maurier. Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland star as the couple mourning the death of their daughter in a sinister, wintry Venice.

Donnie Brasco
(Mike Newell, 1997)
What Unforgiven is to the western, Donnie Brasco is to mafia flicks: carefully demythologising Mob rituals and prising open the sordid emotional realities of criminal life. Johnny Depp, as an FBI mole, adds another solid notch to his early-career gallery of misfits, and Pacino, the washed-up small-timer who tutors him, shows what he can do when he keeps the sluice gates closed.

Donnie Darko
(Richard Kelly, 2001)
Afforded the status of instant cult classic by the Generation Y audience it appealed to, Donnie Darko blends the small-town nostalgia of vintage Spielberg with 1980s teen-movie tropes to create a dark, sci-fi-inspired puzzle. A giant rabbit of the apocalypse, a resurrected Patrick Swayze and Drew Barrymore, and Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal in their first roles of note, all add to its staying power.

Double Indemnity
(Billy Wilder, 1944)
Beware the insurance man with wise cracks on his lips and murder in his heart. But pity the sucker if Barbara Stanwyck answers the door. From James M Cain's novella, this is the film that made Billy Wilder and gave a working definition for "hard-boiled". An everyday story of love, lust and friendship - that three-card trick.

Dougal and the Blue Cat
(Serge Danot, 1970)
Feature-length extension of the Magic Roundabout universe, which ups the psychedelic ante with a full-scale bad trip for Dougal - a room full of sugar. Why can't Florence, Zebedee, Dylan and the others see that newcomer Buxton is a malevolent addition to the garden? After he turns everything blue overnight, it's up to the grumpy furball to try and save the day. Eric Thompson's reworking of the French original may have been adopted as a stoner classic, but it's also a thoughtful, cautionary tale for kids.

Le Doulos
(Jean-Pierre Melville, 1962)
One of Melville's most painstaking homages to American gangster noir, with Jean-Paul Belmondo as the petty crook and copper's nark who is targeted by a fellow crook. Everything is hard-boiled: this is a film about hats and trenchcoats as much as loyalty and betrayal.

Down By Law
(Jim Jarmusch, 1986)
Jarmusch's absurdist style flourishes in this story of a mismatched trio of convicts who go on the lam from prison in Louisiana. When they seek shelter in a room that resembles the cell they have escaped, it becomes clear that Jarmusch's droll comedy is also a riff on No Exit.

Downfall
(Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004)
Bruno Ganz makes a terrifyingly charismatic Hitler in this sombre account of the last days of the Third Reich, as seen through the eyes of his young secretary. Set almost entirely in Hitler's underground bunker, it details the ghoulish devotion of his Nazi court as the Soviet army closes in on Berlin. A thoughtful, humanistic study of absolute power.

Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
(Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
A delusional US general brings on nuclear apocalypse in Kubrick's "nightmare comedy". Gleefully satirical direction and a witty script lampoon cold-war posturing, while Peter Sellers is at his brilliant best as a Nazi scientist, the US president and stuffy group captain Lionel Mandrake. Doomsday has never been such a blast.

Doctor Zhivago
(David Lean, 1965)
David Lean is sometimes pigeon-holed as a purveyor of empty widescreen spectacle - certainly not a criticism that can be levelled at his adaptation of Boris Pasternak's great novel set during the Russian revolution. The emotion is in every frame: if all those scenes of Omar Sharif and Julie Christie making calf eyes at each other aren't enough, Maurice Jarre's music is there to tug at the heartstrings too.

Dracula
(Terence Fisher, 1958)
Silky-smooth Christopher Lee makes an urbane bloodsucker in this delicious gothic horror. Filleting Stoker's novel, it's full of nice touches, such as the blood-soaked credit sequence and the way the birds fall silent as Jonathan Harker approaches Castle Dracula. Peter Cushing is sterling as vampire hunter Van Helsing.

The Draughtsman's Contract
(Peter Greenaway, 1982)
Arguably Greenaway's most accessible film, this elegantly structured and playful murder-mystery/erotic comedy of manners unfolds at a Restoration-era country house. The paradox is that this is one of the most formally innovative period dramas in British film history, and yet as close as its director has come to making a mainstream movie.

The Dream Life of Angels
(Erick Zonca, 1998)
Powerful, naturalistic drama set in Lille about an unlikely friendship between two young down-and-out women. Flat-sitting for a hospitalised mother and daughter, they try to overcome life's difficulties. Zonca's first feature impressively weaves handheld camerawork with the raw emotions of delusions and dreams.

Dreams That Money Can Buy
(Hans Richter, 1947)
An extraordinary assemblage of avant-garde film-making involving some of the highest of high-art names: Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp. Richter's conceit is that dreams are being offered for sale; the resulting portmanteau may be unorthodox cinema, but it's utterly fascinating to watch.

The Dresser
(Peter Yates, 1983)
Albert Finney is a roaring, hard-drinking thesp of the old school and Tom Courtenay his long-suffering personal assistant. Yes, it is stagey - director Peter Yates doesn't have time for any Bullitt-like car chases here - but Finney is in such magnificent form it's churlish to complain about the difficulties of opening up Ronald Harwood's play for the big screen.

Drugstore Cowboy
(Gus Van Sant, 1989)
Van Sant's breakthrough film about an attractive quartet of junkie thieves takes a refreshingly matter-of-fact approach to its easily glamorised subject matter. The movie draws a link between chemical dependence and religious devotion, with lead addict Matt Dillon approaching his recovery as a form of penance.

Drunken Master
(Yuen Woo-Ping, 1978)
Acting drunk is notoriously difficult; doing kung fu and pretending to be hammered must be more difficult to the power of 10. One of six movies Jackie Chan made in 1978, this was the closest fit for his comedic powers. The martial arts are fantastically controlled sprawlings that owe as much to his Beijing Opera training as to po-faced Bruce Lee-esque mysticism.

Duck Soup
(Leo Mccarey, 1933)
It takes real brains and talent to be this silly. Without the cloying romances that sullied many of the Marx brothers' later films, this is pure comedy from start to finish. There are enough sight gags and wordplay here for a dozen movies. Many films deliver an anti-war message, few coat it in jokes as funny as "Go, and never darken my towels again."

Dumb & Dumber
(Peter and Bobby Farrelly, 1994)
A relentlessly hilarious road movie that sealed Jim Carrey's fate as blockbuster clown and also heralded the arrival of the Farrelly brothers. The loose plot is reinforced by an avalanche of gags that make high art out of low-rent humour. Jeff Daniels proves himself no slouch in the comedic stakes - just who is who in the title?

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