Mike Vilensky's Mini-Movie Reviews

After falling in love with the prince, a pretty peasant girl is banished from her animated world and falls into New York City, devoid of colorful costumes and computer animation. Unseemly in a world of flesh, the once-cartoon princess must find her way out and around, as the Prince comes to save her. While the mixed media idea is almost original (though it's similar to how they shot Roger Rabbit), the movie is not, which I suppose will make it accessible Christmas fare.

A gun-for-hire known as Agent 47 is hired by a group known as "The Agency" to kill targets for cash; not quite Christmas fare. The movie, made in six months, seems poised to kill its own targets for cash in quite the same fashion as its protagonist, but perhaps the thrills are worthwhile.

This long-awaited Bob Dylan biopic, featuring six actors including Cate Blanchett (who, yes, plays Bob Dylan) and Christian Bale (who actually seems like a less plausible Bob Dylan than Cate Blanchett) is sure to hit Sag Harbor hard.

A stellar cast of Tom Cruise as a congressman, Meryl Streep as a journalist, and Robert Redford as a journalist, find themselves drawn into an investigation of two injured American soldiers in Afghanistan. It's the movie that Katie Holmes ran to see after finishing the New York City Marathon, and while it probably wasn't worth all the burning in her legs, the political drama delivers.

'Tis the season for campy Christmas films, and I personally find that they never get old. In this season's early Christmas crop, Vince Vaughn plays Santa Claus' little-know brother who, in an Ashlee Simpson-esque move, gets tired of playing second fiddle and moves back to the North Pole to gain his own fame. Juvenile behavior ensues in a film for juveniles that could have waited until at least after Thanksgiving.

Sticking with the holiday season motif, this horror movie finds a career-driven woman trapped in her work's parking garage by a sadistic security guard on Christmas eve! If you aren't tired of the torture genre yet, you may enjoy this truly scary set-up. Just don't take the kids to this twisted holiday bloody-skinflick.

Hamptonite Jerry Seinfeld returns to the big screen as the voice of a recent college graduate bee, disillusioned by the job market for bees, which is severely limited to solely making honey. As the bee travels around New York City, he sets out on a path to change his fate and meets a bee voiced by another fellow Hamptons local, Renée Zellweger. In production since 2003, dare I pun that this film has garnered a ton of buzz?

Ridley Scott directs Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, who play 1970s Harlem gangsters. When the heroin kingpin is dethroned, complications and gunfights ensue in this film that has so much public and critical buzz it would be far more shocking if it weren't one of the best films of the year

Back to Contents