Article: Movies

Denzel Washington has exhibited an impressive range over the years, playing public figures as diverse as Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, unfairly imprisoned boxer Hurricane Carter, South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, and trailblazing high school football coach Herman Boone.

In 1959, when Richard Condon wrote The Manchurian Candidate, the world was at the height of the Cold War. His chilling best seller, set during the Korean War, involved a Communist Chinese plot to brainwash American prisoners-of-war to assassinate a U.S. Presidential nominee.

The Village is set in 1897 in mythical Covington, Pennsylvania, a vague combination Quaker/Shaker/Amish/Pilgrim-style sect whose idyllic, utopian oasis unfortunately sits surrounded by a dense forest ostensibly filled with unspeakable, dreaded creatures. Yet these self-contained townspeople have somehow made peace with their predicament by never venturing into the woods beyond their clearing’s tree-lined boundary, and by performing an assortment of primitive, superstitious rituals to keep their anthropomorphic adversaries at bay.

"It all started on the day that I died," is the ominous first line in this laughable film which itself arrives dead on arrival. Catwoman’s initial failing is that it is narrated by a bored Halle Berry who doesn’t even sound like she believes a word of what she’s saying during that opening montage. "