ReelViews for R movies

For decades, there has been an escalating tension between the NCAA and the student-athletes who play college sports. The center of the conflict lies with Men’s Football and Basketball – two multi-billion dollar empires where the NCAA and its m...

Despite his reputation as one of America's foremost "serious" filmmakers, Oliver Stone's name under the "director" caption does not guarantee a good movie. I learned that lesson while enduring the seemingly-endless tedium of The Doors, and was rem...

Nostalgia can be a wonderful thing, especially when a director tweaks it and plays with it. With Nebraska, Alexander Payne, working from a screenplay credited to Bob Nelson, targets a very specific slice of Americana that has often been romanticize...

Neighbors contains many of the qualities that make raunchy, profane comedies a popular commodity: sex, T&A, drugs, a barrage of four-letter words, and slapstick of the broadest kind. At first glance, one might be tempted to lump Neighbors into the ...

It’s the same sad story: a small movie becomes an unexpected success and, for purely financial reasons, a sequel is commissioned. The follow-up proves not only to be creatively bankrupt but a disappointment on all levels and thereby tarnishes t...

The Neon Demon isn’t only the title of this film, it’s a description of what it represents. Beneath the pulsating music and strobe-lit fluorescent visuals, this is as pernicious and invidious a motion picture as one is likely to discover ...

To call The Nest an unhappy movie would be to understate the matter. There’s not a single cheerful, well-adjusted character in the production – not the venal, overreaching father, Rory O’Hara (Jude Law), or his wife, Allison (Carrie Coon...

In motion pictures, there are essentially three types of satire: a fatuous, silly kind that emphasizes jokes to the exclusion of all else; a lightly comic approach that gently pokes fun at issues while developing a plot and characters; and a vicio...

Watching Never Goin’ Back, I wasn’t sure whether this was intended to be a slice-of-life comedy, a coming of age drama, or a horror film. Since the first two don’t really apply – it’s not nearly as funny as it thinks it is and the ch...

It is an accepted truth that adapting a sublime novel does not always result in a sublime movie. To an extent, this is the problem with Never Let Me Go, Alex Garland's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguru's book. The film's tone, which attempts to captur...