V for Vendetta
Click title to see this St. Anthony Messenger movie review.
|
V for Vendetta (SAM)
V for Vendetta
Provocative futuristic thriller based in London about a masked antihero (Hugo Weaving) who enlists the aid of a young office worker (Natalie Portman) to undermine a totalitarian government headed by an Orwellian dictator (John Hurt) and his cowering advisers (Stephen Rea, Rupert Graves, Tim Pigott-Smith). Director James McTeigue, working from a ...
|
V for Vendetta (CNS)
Vacancy
Scary but ultimately distasteful film about a bickering, estranged couple (Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale, both good) who discover they're the only guests in a dilapidated motel after their car breaks down, and soon realize they're being set up for slaughter and must plot their escape. Director Nimrod Antel skillfully generates ...
|
Vacancy (CNS)
Valentine's Day
Director Garry Marshall's ensemble romantic comedy "Valentine's Day" (New Line)—though chockablock with talented stars—is as unengaging as it is unwieldy. Worse, as penned by Katherine Fugate, this tale of loves lost and found, while rejecting marital infidelity, otherwise takes the full physical expression of affection as a given, before marriage, before ...
|
Valentine's Day (CNS)
Valet, The (La Doublure)
Amusing French farce about a restaurant parking valet (Gad Elmaleh) who is paid to pretend he's having an affair with a supermodel (Alice Taglioni) to fool the suspicious wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) of a wealthy industrialist (Daniel Auteuil) who is actually involved with the model himself, and the sympathetic model helps ...
|
Valet, The (La Doublure) (CNS)
Valiant
Whimsically entertaining, if a bit featherweight, computer-animated adventure set in World War II-era England about a tiny but stalwart carrier pigeon (voiced by Ewan McGregor) who is given the dangerous mission of delivering a vital communique from occupied France safely to England while being hunted by a squadron of ruthless German ...
|
Valiant (CNS)
Valkyrie
Generally well-made and engrossing World War II thriller about the true-life final plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and take over the government by a group of disenchanted army officers (Tom Cruise, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Izzard, Tom Wilkinson and Terence Stamp). Director Bryan Singer maintains a taut, suspenseful pace, performances ...
|
Valkyrie (CNS)
Vampires Suck
As ripe for spoofing as the angst-filled "Twilight" films are, the satire "Vampires Suck" (Fox) rapidly softens way past mere ripeness into toxic, malodorous decay.
To say even that the film lacks bite is to succumb to its beyond-awful level of mirthless humor, which includes severed fingers as "finger ...
|
Vampires Suck (CNS)
Vanity Fair
Splendid adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's classic about heroine Becky Sharp's struggles to survive in Regency England. Reese Witherspoon makes a captivating heroine and holds her own amid a top-notch British cast. Directed by Mira Nair with a sure hand, the story has all the elements of an epic: romance, a ...
|
Vanity Fair (CNS)
Vanity Fair
Click title to see this Every Day Catholic movie review.
|
Vanity Fair (EDC)
Vantage Point
Click title to see this St. Anthony Messenger movie review.
|
Vantage Point (SAM)
Vantage Point
Propulsive thriller about an attempted assassination of the U.S. president (William Hurt) as he delivers an anti-terrorist speech in Spain, as seen from eight different perspectives including his Secret Service men (Dennis Quaid and Matthew Fox), an American tourist (Forest Whitaker), an American TV producer (Sigourney Weaver), a Spanish security officer ...
|
Vantage Point (CNS)
Venom
Brainless and bloody voodoo-themed horror movie set in a backwater Louisiana town where a crowbar-wielding truck driver (Rick Cramer) becomes infested with evil spirits through black magic gone awry and terrorizes a group of teenagers. High on body count and cliches and low on suspense, director Jim Gillespie's bayou blunder is ...
|
Venom (CNS)
Vera Drake
Superbly written and acted period drama (circa 1950) of a lower-middle-class English housewife (Imelda Staunton) who, unbeknownst to her family, helps desperate women who have become pregnant by performing abortions, until a young woman nearly dies after Vera's ministrations, and the authorities apprehend her. Master filmmaker Mike Leigh's abortion theme will ...
|
Vera Drake (CNS)
Veronica Guerin
Truth-based story about an Irish investigative journalist (Cate Blanchett) whose murder in 1996 for exposing high-level organized crime made her a national hero and helped turn the tide in Ireland's war on drugs. While Guerin's real-life martyrdom makes for compelling drama, the biopic, directed by Joel Schumacher, fails to offer any ...
|
Veronica Guerin (CNS)
A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas
Viewers of faith beware: In its largely vain pursuit of laughs, the comedy sequel "A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas" (Warner Bros.) stoops not only to sexual excess but to anti-Catholic animus and even blasphemy.
The result—as written by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg and directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson—is a ...
|
A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas (CNS)
A Very Harold and Kumar’s 3D Christmas
It was never my intention to see this stoner celebration of perpetual adolescence, in the Harold and Kumar pothead
franchise, but I received a request from St. Anthony Messenger to give my
perspective on the film. Personally, I think audiences can look at previews,
readily available on YouTube and check the ratings to know ...
|
A Very Harold and Kumar’s 3D Christmas (SRR)
A Very Long Engagement
Bittersweet World War I drama about a crippled French woman (Audrey Tautou) who embarks on a quest to find out the battlefield fate of her betrothed (Gaspard Ulliel) who, along with four other soldiers, was said to have been killed under mysterious circumstances on the front lines. Part romantic tear-jerker, part ...
|
A Very Long Engagement (CNS)
Van Helsing
Dreadful action adventure about a notorious monster hunter (Hugh Jackman) sent to Transylvania by a secret Vatican agency and charged with helping a local vampire slayer (Kate Beckinsale) rid the world of Count Dracula (Richard Roxburgh) and other fiendish creatures including werewolves and Frankenstein's monster (Shuler Hensley). Despite stylishly gothic atmospherics, ...
|
Van Helsing (CNS)
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Best friends vacationing in Spain—one nonchalantly uninhibited (Scarlett Johansson), the other respectably pragmatic (Rebecca Hall)—accept a charming artist's (Javier Bardem) invitation for a cozy weekend in a resort town, leading to triangular complications, eventually muddied further by the arrival of the artist's volatile ex-wife (Penelope Cruz), and the formation of a ...
|
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (CNS)
View From the Top
Leaden romantic comedy in which a small-town working-class woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) goes after her dream to become an international flight attendant. With a scatterbrained plot and flat jokes, director Bruno Barreto's failed satire chugs along awkwardly unable to maintain interest in its characters. An implied affair, a few sexual references and ...
|
View From the Top (CNS)
Village, The
Click title to see this St. Anthony Messenger movie review.
|
Village, The (SAM)
Village, The
Well-crafted but predictable film by M. Night Shyamalan about an isolated 19th-century village located in the middle of a forest inhabited by fearsome creatures, discouraging anyone from venturing to the outlying towns. Production values and performances are generally fine, and Shyamalan sustains a reasonably suspenseful mood throughout, but all the fine ...
|
Village, The (CNS)
Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days and 30 Nights -- Hollywood to the Heartland
Promising documentary -- ultimately undermined by too much blue humor -- that follows a 2005 comedy tour of the western U.S. organized by Vaughn and featuring four up-and-coming performers (Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst and Sebastian Maniscalco) as well as country singer Dwight Yoakam and other friends of the impresario. ...
|
Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days and 30 Nights -- Hollywood to the Heartland (CNS)
Visitor, The
Sensitive, intimate drama in which an emotionally repressed economics professor (Richard Jenkins) discovers a couple (Haaz Sleiman and Danai Gurira), both undocumented aliens, unwittingly squatting in his long-unvisited Greenwich Village apartment as the result of a scam and becomes involved in their travails, eventually also forming a bond with the young ...
|
Visitor, The (CNS)
Visitor, The
Click title to see this St. Anthony Messenger movie review.
|
Visitor, The (SAM)
Vitus
Beguiling, unusual fable of a 12-year-old piano prodigy (Teo Gheorghiu) who, overburdened by his musical and mathematical genius and his loving but overprotective mother (Julika Jenkins), begins to find life intolerable until a near-fatal fall results in the seeming loss of his talent. Writer-director Fredi M. Murer's film was the Swiss ...
|
Vitus (CNS)
Volver
Click title to see this St. Anthony Messenger movie review.
|
Volver (SAM)
Volver
Engrossing story about a devoted mother (Penelope Cruz) who covers up the murder of her husband after her teenage daughter (Yohana Cobo) stabs him in self-defense, and then opens a thriving restaurant. Writer-director Pedro Almodovar has made one of his finest films, in which Cruz gives a multifaceted performance, while the ...
|
Volver (CNS)
The Vow
When I learned that Rachel McAdams
was going to play the lead role in what looked to be another tearjerker film
about marriage I wondered if the story would be based on a Nicholas Sparks
novel such as “The Notebook.” No, this new film is based on a very true story
that was told in ...
|
The Vow (SRR)
The Vow
Poor Channing Tatum! Though he isn't gone, he is forgotten in "The Vow" (Screen Gems), director and co-writer Michael Sucsy's well-intentioned but flawed love story based on real events.
Tatum plays Chicago recording engineer Leo, whose romance with — and marriage to — artist Paige (Rachel McAdams) have made him a ...
|
The Vow (CNS)
|
