ReelViews for R movies

"Whatever you do, don't fall asleep." - Nancy The dream - or nightmare - is a staple of the modern horror movie. After all, even as manipulative as the device is, it's still a proven way to jolt an audience. Filmmaker Wes Craven understood th...

There is a scene in Nil by Mouth, actor Gary Oldman's directorial debut, that is excruciatingly difficult to watch. It's not especially graphic, since the gruesome details take place out of frame, but anyone with an imagination can conjure up ...

Edson Oda’s debut feature, Nine Days, is a pure allegory; the film works as an extended philosophical rumination but fails as a story. Although interesting in many aspects, Nine Days is as often frustrating as it is compelling, and the denou...

What's the point? If I wanted to spend 12 minutes watching someone pushing a cart around a grocery store, I'd go to the local A&P, not sit in a movie theater. At least then I could get the week's shopping done. Nine Lives is a failed experiment...

The Ninth Gate has two modes: tedious and moronic, with the two not being mutually exclusive. Then, one-hundred minutes into this seemingly interminable movie (which clocks in at about 2:10), things take a turn for the worse and The Ninth Gate spi...

It's always a tricky proposition to make a motion picture based on recent history -- and the more public the episode, the more difficult it is for the film maker to balance drama with accuracy. This is especially true when that film maker is Olive...

Expecting normalcy from a Coen Brothers production is a pointless endeavor, but anticipating brilliance isn't outlandish. Their latest feature, which has about zero box office potential, provides plenty of the latter and a little of the former. It�...

It's increasingly unusual that a thriller can claim to maintain its intensity for the entirety of its running length. No Escape is masterful at keeping the stakes high without confounding our so-called "suspension of disbelief." Unlike ...

No Hard Feelings is an odd movie in that films of this sort have fallen out of vogue in the 21st century and are rarely accorded any sort of theatrical release. (The box office results will determine whether the decision to reject a direct-to-stre...

Korean director Park Chan-wook has never played it safe, and his tilted sensibilities have sometimes paid off handsomely, whether in the form of the cult classic Oldboy or the Hitchcockian The Handmaiden (which remains Park's best film). His lates...