ReelViews for R movies

Jeff, Who Lives at Home is the second mainstream offering from mumblecore* directors Jay & Mark Duplass. The brothers took their first stab at reaching a broader audience with 2010's Cyrus, an affecting drama that demonstrated Jonah Hill's ability ...

Jennifer's Body mixes, matches, and crosses three popular genres: horror, comedy, and teen angst. Unfortunately, it fails at all of them - and "fails" might be too kind a term. This movie is a spectacular disaster, the kind of thing a cat might b...

Every time I think Hollywood has slipped beyond redemption, someone in the system produces a film like Jerry Maguire that renews my faith. Apparently, creativity is not dead in the mainstream movie market -- not entirely, at least. This is th...

Initially, the stage-to-screen transition of the Broadway musical Jersey Boys was expected to be helmed by Jon Favreau. When Favreau withdrew, it opened the door for veteran director Clint Eastwood to take the reins. Eastwood's approach to telling ...

Barry Levinson had an idea, and a pretty good one at that: take an actor, have him assume the role of a vigilante, and, as public adulation of his assumed personae escalates, blur the line between being a vigilante and acting the part. Unfortunat...

Jindabyne, an adaptation of Raymond Carver's short story "So Much Water So Close to Home," is an examination of a fractured family and how mistakes and miscommunication can lead to the widening of pre-existing fissures. While these themes are in t...

John Dies at the End is problematical. It's an attempt by director Don Coscarelli to adapt a book that has a fanatical following but has often been described as "unfilmable." The end result has garnered mixed reactions from those who love David Won...

John Wick is a rousing action thriller of the sort rarely encountered in theaters these days. The once popular genre, which was headlined by the likes of Stallone and Schwarzenegger during its heyday, has been a dying breed during the past two deca...

The John Wick series, now on cruise control for its third installment, has fallen into a trap. The filmmakers have become so intent on delivering “more of the same” that they have lost all sense of proportion. While hyper-violent, quasi-co...

John Wick has lost his mojo. The aspect of this franchise that made it compulsively watchable for the first two installments has degraded during the last two. John Wick has always been a comic book-style property (although Chapter 4 feels more lik...