Vanguard News Network

“The Neighbor” (2018), starring William Fichtner and Jean Louisa Kelly. (You might remember Fichtner from “The Perfect Storm” [2000], which would have been a good movie if they had left the issue of race out of it, and had just stuck to fishing themes). This movie is low-key, sedate, maybe even a little boring for […]

“The Turn Of The Screw” (British; 1992). Good acting, music and atmosphere. [Video; 1 hour, 35 minutes].

Sounds like a pretty good film, but one thing: the word “hero” is used much too freely in our society. Very often, “helping/saving people” is in the job description of whoever is being called a “hero” (e.g., cops, firefighters, paramedics, security guards, etc. Even airplane pilots have a duty to try and save their passengers […]

Shane (Western; 1953; starring Alan Ladd and Van Heflin). A mild-mannered drifter named Shane defends a frontier family and locks horns with thugs in Old Wyoming. The cinematography alone is a must-see, not counting the movie itself, which is very worth watching. Definitely one of the ten best Westerns ever made.

The Hills Have Eyes (Horror; 2006; Unrated Version; starring Kathleen Quinlan and Aaron Stanford; directed by Alexandre Aja). A vacationing family, stranded in the New Mexico desert, is preyed upon by human mutants. The movie is gory and disturbing, but nonetheless it works. The extremely barren landscape adds a sense of surrealism and hopelessness to […]

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947, B&W, starring Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney). Circa 1900, a young widow (played by Tierney) rents a house on the seashore, but the house is haunted by a sea captain’s ghost (played by Harrison). Good acting, good aesthetics, sentimental but not too sentimental. A better-than-average movie.

Missing (1982; starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek). This is a political movie based on a true story. It’s about a young, left-wing journalist (a New Yorker named Charles Horman), who moves down to Chile to support, uhh, “socialism.” He vanishes during the 1973 military coup which brought Augusto Pinochet to power. (A lot of […]

Pleasantville (1998; starring Reese Witherspoon and Tobey Maguire). This movie is pure propaganda. It’s Herbert Marcuse’s ideology on film. Here’s the basic plot: two modern, White teenagers are mysteriously transported into a 1950s “Leave It To Beaver”-type TV show. The message of this movie is: life sucked in the too-conservative 1950s, it was too rigid, […]

(Above: Cyd Charisse, left, and Gene Kelly) Brigadoon (a musical, starring Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse, 1954; on DVD). Brigadoon is a normally-invisible Scottish village that appears once every 100 years. An American hunter (Kelly) falls in love with a Brigadoon girl (Charisse), unaware of the town’s unusual circumstances. This is an entertaining movie which […]

Gallipoli (1981, starring Mel Gibson and Mark Lee). This is a war movie set in 1915. Two friends join the Australian army and end up fighting in Turkey for no good reason. To me, this movie highlighted the senselessness and stupidity of global war, especially since (spoiler alert here) one of the friends dies needlessly […]