Product Description

Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, Sigourney Weaver. For many years, an isolated town has a pact with strange creatures that occupy the surrounding woods-but the peace is threatened when one of the village's children falls ill, and one young man must brave the unknown to find a remedy. 2004/color/108 min/PG-13.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7193 in DVD
• Brand: Buena Vista Home Video
• Published on: 2005-01-01
• Released on: 2005-01-11
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Widescreen, Dolby, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: French, Spanish
• Dubbed in: French
• Dimensions: .24 pounds
• Running time: 108 minutes

Features

• M. Night Shyamalan (SIGNS, UNBREAKABLE, THE SIXTH SENSE), the director who brought you the world's greatest thrillers on DVD, now creates his most thought-provoking triumph yet . breaking international records and dazzling audiences around the globe! THE VILLAGE is a smart, edge-of-your-seat chiller crawling with terrifying surprises and frightening twists and turns. An isolated, tight-knit c

Amazon.com
Even when his trademark twist-ending formula wears worrisomely thin as it does in The Village, M. Night Shyamalan is a true showman who knows how to serve up a spookfest. He's derailed this time by a howler of a "surprise" lifted almost directly from "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim," an episode of The Twilight Zone starring Cliff Robertson that originally aired in 1961. Even if you're unfamiliar with that Rod Serling scenario, you'll have a good chance of guessing the surprise, which ranks well below The Sixth Sense and Signs on Shyamalan's shock-o-meter. That leaves you to appreciate Shyamalan's proven strengths, including a sharp eye for fear-laden compositions, a general sense of unease, delicate handling of fine actors (alas, most of them wasted here, save for Bryce Dallas Howard in a promising debut), and the cautious concealment of his ruse, which in this case involves a 19th-century village that maintains an anxious truce with dreadful creatures that live in the forbidden woods nearby. Will any of this take anyone by genuine surprise? That seems unlikely, since Emperor Shyamalan has clearly lost his clothes in The Village, but it's nice to have him around to scare us, even if he doesn't always succeed. --Jeff Shannon

From The New Yorker
M. Night Shyamalan has made a career out of devising films that manage to frighten and excite without ever quite coming alive. Given his obsession with the deceased, this may be construed as appropriate. Even by his standards, however, this new picture is dangerously dour. The setting is a hamlet in the American countryside, ringed by crackling woods and inhabited by a community so glum that its leader is played by William Hurt. The roles of his fellow-elders are taken by, among others, Sigourney Weaver and Brendan Gleeson, while the younger generation is represented by Joaquin Phoenix and Bryce Dallas Howard-the only live wire on the scene, and hence a considerable relief. The love between these two is the spark for mysterious occurrences, notably the invasion of the closed society by a bevy of red-robed woodland beasts. As is Shyamalan's wont, there are twists, although they are so heavily signalled as to be drained of shock; what is surprising is that, even here, in the midst of a humorless conceit, the viewer can be stirred and dismayed; when a director is damned for repeating himself, it can be a sign that he has touched a nerve whose rawness refuses to fade. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Peter Travers, ROLLING STONE
"Shyamalan gives the film a metaphorical weight that goes deeper than goose bumps."

"Shyamalan deftly turns a familiar fairy tale into an eerie scary tale."

"The Village is Shyamalan's best film since The Sixth Sense..."