ReelViews for R movies

There is so little wrong with this film that I'll get the incidental negatives out of the way first. The introductory moments are somewhat confusing, and it takes about fifteen or twenty minutes to get the characters and situations straight. Made...

The Last Picture Show is a character study in the truest sense of the term: a movie in which the narrative is just a mechanism by which we get to know the men and women inhabiting a small-town Texas community in the early 1950s. For director ...

It's a genuine pleasure to come across a motion picture like The Last Samurai - a rousing tale that combines high adventure with emotional effectiveness. This movie works because it never loses sight of the characters no matter how epic the scope ...

"[The Last Seduction] is a roller coaster of twists and turns. It is the classic film noir thriller, but it turns everything on its head. Just when you think you know what's going to happen, it does a twist into the unexpected. I'm a fan of the ...

Watching The Last Showgirl, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the lyrics of the 1978 Barry Manilow song, “Copacabana”:Her name is Lola, she was a showgirl But that was thirty years ago, when they used to have a show Now it’s a disco, but ...

Old action heroes don't die or fade away; they just keep going. Once upon a time, being an action star had an expiration date. Now, as long as there's some acknowledgment of the aging process - a line here, a joke there - it's viewed as more of ...

Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer), or - more properly - Lev Tolstoy, is one of the two best-known 19th century Russian authors. His masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are required reading in many high school and college literature clas...

The Last Vermeer is something of an old-fashioned courtroom melodrama, complete with impassioned speeches, a sneering prosecutor, an antagonistic judge, and a last-minute gotcha! For those who enjoy this kind of “it only happens in the movie...

After decades of neutering, it’s fun to once again encounter a vampire who is bestial and monstrous. The vampires in this movie don’t sparkle when exposed to the sun, they burst into flame and die horribly. And the king of all un-dead, the leg...

The entrenchment of a top-flight cast should not be considered an indication of cinematic quality. Although it's true that good actors can sometimes redeem a bad screenplay, more often than not, they end up becoming trapped by it. Such is the case ...