The Vourdalak (French: 'La Famille du Vourdalak') (2023)

This French fantasy — at times horrible but never really horror; more ghastly, like a Grimms' fairytale — is based on a 1839 Russian novella about an aristocrat, lost in a Serbian forest, who encounters a strange family, and it's this story rather than the movie that is interesting — the monstrous patriarch predates Bram Stoker's Dracula — but the ghastly monster-like character is a weird overacting claymation or puppet, which detracts from rather than enhances your engagement with the gothic goings-on. 

★★★☆☆

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八っ墓村 (Yatsuhaka-mura) ('Village of Eight Graves') (1977)

Author Seishi Yokomizo's convoluted mystery has thankfully been trimmed of several characters and the action streamlined in this ripper adaptation of his book, which connects sixteenth-century feudal events in Japan to a modern-day Japanese murder mystery in the village of Yatsuhakamura (Village of Eight Graves) and, though a mystery, it enthusiastically embraces horror — the body count is exorbitant, there's a chilling link to the real-life 1938 Tsuyama incident, and scenes of maniacal villains chasing victims through labyrinthine limestone caves amid ghastly 70s giallo stylings.

★★★★☆

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The Voyeurs (2022)

Imagine L B "Jeff" Jefferies and Lisa Fremont getting off on watching, through a feverishly passed back and forth shared pair of binoculars, Lars Thorgood regularly doing it and you get the idea of Amazon Prime's The Voyeurs, a movie that starts promisingly, riffs interestingly on eyeballs, titillates regularly with a tangle of young, beautiful bodies, but ultimately insults by flinging carelessly at audiences a series of glib, eye-roll inducing twists that only the most unquestioning of viewers will accept.

★★☆☆☆

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)

Some of these superhero cartoons feel especially lightweight, like an eight-page comic that is opened, flipped through, closed and discarded in almost one motion, like this sequel to the original Venom featuring a villain who is vividly brought to life by an oddly-wigged Woody Harrelson but only for a few moments — a moment involving chickens, one about a dinner date, and a sfx-laden car-ride moment — before he is dispatched in a climactic sfx spectacle, chomped by Tom Hardy's symbiot (investigative journalist Eddie Brock and his cartoony, toothy alien parasite, Venom, who leaps out from between Brock's shoulderblades) and then the credits roll, before we learn anything interesting — or anything at all —about Brock, about Venom (he eats chickens), about that villain, or about Brock's three "in-the-know" allies: a shopkeeper, a former lover, and the former lover's new man. 

★★☆☆☆

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Gamera VS Viras (ガメラ対宇宙怪獣バイラス) (US: Destroy All Planets) (1968)

My first encounter with Gamera, the beloved icon from Japan's long-running kaiju movie series, was watching this 1968 movie, the fourth, that pits the fire-breathing turtle-with-a-frozen-stare against a fidgetspinner from outerspace with a bumblebee paint job; the incoherent monster battles that make up a bulk of the movie's ninety-one minutes entertain on account of their rudimentary but serviceable special effects, but you'll want to experience them with the tv muted — kaiju battles make nails down a blackboard sound positively melodic.

★★★☆☆

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The Villainess (악녀) (Ak Nyeo) (2017)

The opening scene of Byung gil Jung's action movie, about a female assassin hellbent on revenge, is an extended first-person ultra-violent sword massacre of hundreds of suited thugs - a startling and original sequence that has you sitting up, awake, and paying attention (through your fingers) - but no sooner does this sequence end than the movie slips into very familiar territory, not just reminiscent of Kill Bill Vol.1 and La Femme Nikita but using near-exact replica scenes - from the child-under-the-bed moment to the honeymoon-suite bathroom assassination, so that what started so startlingly and originally ends up so generic and well-trodden it almost feels like a fanboy tribute.

★★☆☆☆

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Vanity Fair (2004)

To give you an idea of the pace, war breaks out in one scene and Reese Witherspoon's all-too-American Becky Sharp, the social-climbing female-Barry Lyndon central to William Makepeace Thackeray's 1847 novel, helps her fellow pregnant friend into a shelter where they talk momentarily about their impending motherhood and in the next scene when they emerge onto the street, the Napoleonic Wars are over and they are mothers of 15-year-olds, and so it goes - a breezy line about a funeral is dropped to inform us of the death of a major character we saw cough just a moment earlier; a first kiss immediately precedes a scene of extended family bliss - and while it may be an impressive feat of screenwriting to capture most things that happen in Thackeray's 650-odd pages of sweeping, multigenerational period drama, as a movie this feels too often like a mere highlight reel.

★★☆☆☆

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Verónica (2017)

About a high school girl terrorised by something supernatural after a seance with her friends, this 2017 Spanish supernatural thriller, not to be confused with the other 2017 Spanish thriller titled Verónica, recalls It Follows with its retro synthesizer cool and high school setting, and there's also a strong whiff of The Conjuring series given the suggestion made via this movie's initial documentary stylings that the story is based on actual events, of itself a not very interesting approach for a movie of this type but used here in conjunction with some truly original creepiness to keep viewers on their toes.

★★★★☆

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Verónica (2017)

When a retired psychologist agrees to start seeing a new patient, it turns out she means for her consultations with this mentally ill stranger, who may or may not be responsible for the disappearance of her former therapist, to take place in the psychologist's remote forest hideaway with the two of them magically sharing the knowledge that sleepovers are a part of the bundled service, which is the point it becomes clear this psychological thriller is not going to be very intelligent no matter how many references to Freud and the Platonic forms it bandies around.

★★☆☆☆

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Vox Lux (2019)

It is entirely possible the provocative scenes of terrorism and Willem Dafoe's voiceover (an omniscient fairytale narration which lapses occasionally into an uncertain subjunctive mood, as unnecessary as it is overwritten: sex is "nocturnal activities" and Stockholm a "far from exotic city in Europe", thank you very much) were tacked on in a last ditch effort to render different from A Star Is Born this dismaying snorefest, the abyssmal likes of which I haven't experienced since Winona Ryder and James Franco's The Letter.

★☆☆☆☆

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Venom (2018)

Like the title character, Venom, a deep-voiced cartoony many-toothed alien parasite with a permanently protruding tongue that somehow doesn't get bitten off, this Marvel superhero genesis story is in a desperate race to reach symbiosis: Tom Hardy's Eddie Brock, Venom's host, is one minute sitting with a deathly pallor in a restaurant fishtank eating live lobsters and the next is exchanging wisecracks with his new partner in fighting street crime — I didn't want to watch it, but the movie needed twenty more minutes to calmly set things up instead of quick-sticks racing to a scribbly mess of a climax because, presumably, there are more episodes to make.

★★☆☆☆

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Vacation (2015)

There are some amusing predicaments typical of the sort the old Griswolds got themselves into, in this 2015 new generation tie-in to the National Lampoon's movie series, but the new movie doesn't work very well because where the Chevy Chase movies were comedies for the whole family with a moral compass and humour of both the more risque adult variety and some goofy childish stuff as well, this new movie is aimed squarely at a teenage audience judging from all the young people in it who swear like troopers, the outrageous lack of consequence in scenes that end calamitously with injury and death, and not to mention the update's distinct lack of heart — this is sometimes funny, but more often shrill, puerile.

★★☆☆☆

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The Visit (1964)

Not the M Night Shyamalan thriller but also something of a garish fairytale, this is the 1964 movie version of Friedtich Dürrenmatt's 1956 tragicomic play about a fabulously wealthy woman who, like The Count of Monte Cristo, returns to her childhood home to exact revenge, but unlike The Count of Monte Cristo she makes her past and her motives crystal clear, announcing an unsettling proposition at a dinner party thrown by the town in her honour: she will give the townspeople $2 million dollars if they acknowledge the injustice she suffered as a 17 year old and kill Miller, the man who put her 'in a family way' before conspiring to run her out of town — money corrupts is the main message, put simply, but in light of recent real-life retrospective litigations, there is other food-for-thought.

★★★☆☆

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Venus in Fur (La Venus A La Fourrure) (2013)

David Ives' tricksy Broadway play about a woman auditioning for a role in a play is made an even more tricksy film by director Roman Polanski who casts his doppleganger Mathieu Almaric as Thomas, the writer of the play, and his wife Emmanuelle Seigner as Vanda, the woman auditioning, a move which adds an extra layer of complexity to the two-character story that, as Vanda and Thomas do a readthrough of the script together, plays on ideas of dominance and submission between director and actor, Vanda and Thomas, the play's Vanda and Severin, the goddess Venus and Severin, Venus and Thomas, woman and man, and here, real-life husband and wife, and it is just a shame all this highbrow carry-on ends feeling so inconsequential.

★★★☆☆

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The Verdict (1982)

In the 90s, John Grisham finessed the legal thriller, pitting young, ambitious "David" lawyers against corrupt "Goliath" corporations, ensuring their hardwork and unerring moral compasses were rewarded in the end with rousing courtroom wins, and cramming in a zillion thrilling subplots, but this is 1982, pre-Grisham's first novel, and Paul Newman's silver-fox lawyer is an alcoholic we don't much care about even after hearing a sob story, his hard work is confined to a single night of phone calling which just magically turns up the wee administrative matter upon which the entire court case hinges, the subplots here (a hostile judge, a duplicitous love interest) are momentary scenes abandoned, and while there are plenty of pompous, uncaring Boston stuffed shirts roaming about unfazed by moral injustice and suffering, nothing here constitutes a diabolical "Goliath" organisation that deserves its comeuppance, so all-in-all this courtroom procedural is dry and unfolds at a pace akin to reading a court transcript, not a John Grisham page-turner.

★★☆☆☆

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Vertigo (1958)

Alfred Hitchcock's noirish thriller about a detective hired by a friend to follow his wife, who dies, hinges on an obsessive and controlling relationship that develops between James Stewart's detective, John "Scottie" Ferguson, and Kim Novak's character who resembles the wife and it is hard to swallow, first, that the actor James Stewart plays this kind of weirdo and, second, that Novak's character Judy Barton would allow things to progress to the point that Ferguson does creepy things like dye her hair and dress her up, but innovative dolly zooms and flashing primary colour filters coupled with some Freudian psychology about obsessional love and second chances help turn these problems into trifles in another Hitchcock masterpiece.

★★★★★

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Vice (2015)

A company, "Vice", that offers hedonistic roleplaying experiences, embellishes its A.I. sex robots with elaborate backstories and personalities, which seems a fairly unnecessary thing to do not just for the clientele who are not privy to the robots' bedtime conversations with their robot sisters but also unnecessary to the chase that occupies most of this daft scifi's runtime when one of the sex robots escapes Vice and for an hour and a half runs through point blank machine-gun fire.

★☆☆☆☆

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Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Vicky and Cristina, American friends on holiday in Spain, have a pleasant time exploring art galleries and historical sites but when they encounter handsome Spanish painter Juan Antonio and his fiery ex-lover played hilariously by Penelope Cruz, they also end up exploring their notions of love and sex and monogamy, in Woody Allen's riotous comedy drama that features not so much a love triangle as a love square or pentagon!

★★★★☆ 

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The Visit (2015)

This is a creepy, unpleasant movie about two personality-free kids home-videoing their weeklong visit to their grandparents, an elderly pair who behave increasingly strangely, and most people will see the twist-in-the-end coming in the first ten minutes and will find the handicam videography tiresome.

★★☆☆☆

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Vertige (High Lane) (2009)

This senseless, complete stinker of a horror movie with not one single coherent idea in it (least of all whether it is day or night, or whether its unlikeable central four characters are coming or going or like each other or don't) dares to suggest in its final insulting frame that its mess somehow offers meaningful comment on real disappearances in the Balkans!

☆☆☆☆☆ (No stars)

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