ReelViews for R movies

Romantic comedies are fantasies. They invite us to fall in love with the main characters as they fall in love with each other. That's difficult to accomplish when viewers find themselves actively disliking those characters. How is it possible to...

My Family, the portrait of a Mexican-American family living in East Los Angeles, boasts a series of distinguished thematic antecedents, including Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather and Zhang Yimou's To Live. Here, as in the 1972 gangster saga, t...

Beware Opening Night films at film festivals. More often than not, they disappoint. Such is the case with Christine Lahti's My First Mister, which was given the undisputed honor of opening the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. From audience members a...

Movie-goers attend Ken Loach movies for a variety of reasons, but one of them is not to have a "feel good" experience. The reason? Loach consistently looks at believable characters in realistic situations. His pictures are not escapist; they're ...

My Old Ass is an effective and affecting coming-of-age story with a large dose of magical realism that allows an 18-year-old version of the lead character to meet her 39-year-old self. Despite what has been written about it in some quarters, this ...

My Summer of Love reserves the irony of its title for viewers who see the entire film. Yes, this is about the events of a summer, but it's up to the individual to decide whether what we're seeing on screen is love, a crush, co-dependency, or someth...

At first glance, My Week with Marilyn might seem like a salacious behind-the-scenes look at a mostly forgotten (yet high profile at the time) movie that had its share of off-camera drama. However, a closer examination of the film reveals an incompl...

With Mystic River, Clint Eastwood has rebounded nicely from the failure of his mediocre previous effort, Blood Work. Absent from the screen but behind the camera for the first time since Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Eastwood concentrat...

When it comes to historical epics, Ridley Scott has a checkered past and Napoleon, his bio-pic of the early-19th century ruler of France, doesn’t change that. An uneven and historically questionable examination of the man behind the legend, the ...

Not only is Nashville the title of Robert Altman's 1975 cinematic masterpiece and the name of the city in which the action is set, but it is the biggest and most colorful character on a palette crammed with well-developed, interesting individuals. ...