Movie Reviews
Titles starting with V
The Village
M. Night Shabadabadoo (or whatever) has had an interesting career. He made two small films no one has ever heard of, then the monster smash hit The Sixth Sense, with Bruce Willis in his best role in some time. I loved it. I was totally taken in, like just about everybody else. Then he made Unbreakable, again with Bruce. I remember it as ... Read more »
The Village of the Damned
In the ‘50s and ‘60s John Wyndham made a living writing books that were usually apocalyptic, but apocalyptic in surprising ways. No nuclear war for him. He wrote things like The Day of the Triffids, a very unusual alien invasion. I read all his books, and loved them. Triffids was made into a decent movie, but this one, based on his book The ... Read more »
Vincent and Theo
There is something that really bums me out about this film that has nothing to do with the film itself. It was originally a 200-minute series on the BBC. Then it was edited to a 138-minute version for theatrical release. That’s the one we saw, and we liked it so much that we felt cheated that we couldn’t see the whole thing. It seems it has been released in the UK, in the Region 2 format, ... Read more »
Violet and Daisy
The main reason I decided to see this is that I want to go back and take a look at some of the movies Tatiana Maslany was in before her brilliant breakout roles in Orphan Black. That was a bit of a waste of time. She appears only at the very end of the film, a scene that lasts about one minute, with only one line of dialogue. Other than that, there are pictures ... Read more »
The Virgin Spring
In 1965 I escaped the cultural backwater of Beaumont-Port Arthur to attend college at Michigan State University. One of the first things I noticed was that I could see the sort of films they just didn’t show in Southeast Texas. Silent films. Movies where they talked funny, and you had to read subtitles. A whole bunch of classics that they just didn’t show on TV.
I joined the film ... Read more »
Virginia City
… is the birthplace of “Mark Twain,” as this was the first place Sam Clemens used his famous pseudonym in 1863. He would have been resident there during the time this film portrays, which is 1864. It’s a real swashbuckler cowboys and Indians action picture, but without the Indians. Standing in for them, even to the point of enacting the famous cliché scene of the savages a-whoopin’ and ... Read more »
Visions of Light
The person most responsible for what you see up on the silver screen in a darkened theater is not the writer, nor the director, nor the set designer, nor the producer. That person is the cinematographer. Film is a visual medium first, a story-telling medium second. Plot is not strictly necessary, but light is, and the structuring and shaping of that light is the most important job in ... Read more »
The Visitor
This is the second feature written and directed by the actor Thomas McCarthy, the first being the excellent The Station Agent, which made Peter Dinklage into a much bigger (so to speak) star than he was before. Let’s hope it happens to the star of this one, Richard Jenkins. You probably don’t know his name—I didn’t, either—but you probably do know his face, as ... Read more »
Vitus
Pronounced VEE-tus, is a Swiss boy who we first see at age 6, and later at age 12. He is a prodigy in more ways than one … actually too many ways to be strictly believable, but this is a feel-good movie, and if I like the people, plausibility doesn’t matter so much to me. He lives with his parents in Geneva, where he annoys his teachers by being a lot smarter than they are. But his ... Read more »
Volunteers
I thought I had seen all the Tom Hanks movies, but this one must have slipped through the cracks. It is not one of his classic best, but in the right mood you might find it entertaining. We did.
Tom is the worthless ne’er-do-well son of a rich father, played nicely by George Plimpton. But he has a gambling problem, a bad one. He is into some very bad people for $14,000, which he ... Read more »