ReelViews for R movies

If you were paying attention to the news in 2015, the phrase “Panama Papers” will mean something. The Laundromat is Steven Soderbergh’s expose about the release of those documents, which provided details of more than 200,000 offshore acc...

One aspect that virtually assures a good motion picture is solid character development (sometimes referred to as a "character arc"). It doesn't matter if it's a mainstream movie or an offbeat indie - any narrative-based film benefits if the charact...

The premise of Law Abiding Citizen - angry father seeks revenge on the system when his daughter's murderer gets off with a light sentence - probably sounded great in the pitch meetings but, as with all high concept motion pictures, the devil's in t...

The niche occupied by Lawless is a precarious one. Too erudite for the average action/thriller-oriented moviegoer and too pulpy for the art house crowd, this intense, brutal drama may struggle to find an audience. A fictionalized account of the lif...

Despite the stewardship of director Stephen Frears and the participation of Bruce Willis, Rebecca Hall, Vince Vaughn, and Catherine Zeta-Jones, Lay the Favorite, a would-be breezy comedy set in the world of grifters and gamblers, is as forgettable ...

Layer Cake is the latest in the recent cluster of British gangster/caper films begun by Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Matthew Vaughn, the director and co-producer of Layer Cake, held the producing credit for Lock and Ritchie's...

Layer Cake is the latest in the recent cluster of British gangster/caper films begun by Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Matthew Vaughn, the director and co-producer of Layer Cake, held the producing credit for Lock and Ritchie's...

The Layover is an appalling movie – a reworked version of the essential plot elements of 2011’s Something Borrowed with everything worthwhile (and there wasn’t much to begin with) removed. The result is an unpleasant, unwatchable example...

Around the time that Mike Figgis began production of Leaving Las Vegas, John O'Brien, the author of the book upon which the film is based, shot himself in the head. This story, according to O'Brien's father, is his son's suicide note. And what an...

Despite a terrific performance by Kate Winslet and some powerful moments during the film’s final third, Lee falls into the bio-pic trap of trying to encapsulate too much of a famous person’s life into a two-hour chunk. A chronology of the life...