ReelViews for R movies

Watching Angel provides a window into the dregs of a long-dead genre: the low-budget exploitation thriller. Although this sort of film didn’t make it past the mid-1990s, it thrived during the 1980s when it was often used to fill out drive-in dou...

It’s not surprising that Angel Has Fallen exists. The first film in the series, Olympus Has Fallen, performed well enough ($100M domestic; $170M worldwide) to justify a sequel. London Has Fallen opened three years later to a less enthusiasti...

Luc Besson's Angel-A is about as offbeat of a love story as one is likely to find in a movie theater. Think of Wings of Desire crossed with It's a Wonderful Life and crafted applying a film noir style, and you'll have an idea of what the movie off...

Like Frankenstein and Hamlet, Anna Karenina is a literary touchstone that filmmakers return to on a regular basis. The first filmed version of the book was a 1910 German silent which has long since been lost to the ages. It was released shortly bef...

The Conjuring “franchise” rolls on, with another cash-grab further tarnishing the reputation of what offered one of the best one-two punches of any horror duo. Monetization of James Wan’s universe has led to a large number of subpar spin...

A breath of fresh air? Or a pretentious mess? Perhaps a little of both. It’s easy to see why a mainstream viewer might quickly lose patience with Annette but I found the film’s embrace of unconventionality to be bracing and energizing…at...

Science fiction means different things to different people. For some, it’s the quasi-fantasy/space opera of Star Wars. For others, it’s allegorical space-faring material like Star Trek. And for still others, it encompasses a strongly techni...

Anomalisa offers evidence that animated films are not necessarily the sole province of children. In fact, this one isn’t even designed for all adults. Charlie Kaufman has always been something of an acquired taste. Anomalisa highlights Kaufman at h...

Going into Anora, I wasn’t sure what to expect but it certainly wasn’t a screwball comedy. Yet, following an explosively erotic, wild twist on the Pretty Woman cliché, writer/director Sean Baker guides his movie into an extended period of...

When it comes to simple favors, the last thing that we need is another one. It would have been different if the first film, 2018’s A Simple Favor, had been deserving of a sequel rather than being just another failed comedy/thriller that only a fe...