ReelViews for R movies

There's a lot going on in Deterrence, the directorial debut of journalist-turned-filmmaker Rod Lurie. Presidential election politics. An international crisis. The threat of nuclear war. All that, plus a blizzard that keeps the President trappe...

In July 1967, civil unrest resulting from the brutality of the predominantly white Detroit police department reached a boiling point. The result, which history has named the “12th Street Riot”, was one of the deadliest and destructive riots in...

I love the beginning – the sense of time and place. Part of this has to do with the introductory voiceover narration (provided by the writer of the novel, Donald Ray Pollock, whose intonation has all the right qualities for this job). Part o...

It seems that in a period detective story, it's a prerequisite for the main character to narrate the proceedings. In Devil in a Blue Dress, writer/director Carl Franklin apparently intended this conceit as a tribute to the Dashiell Hammett/Raymond...

Taylor Hackford's The Devil's Advocate has many laudable qualities, but subtlety is not among them. The story, which postulates that the devil is walking among us today, gives Satan's human alter-ego a truly obvious name: John Milton (for those w...

The advance word on The Devil's Own was, to put it mildly, not good. About a month ago, Brad Pitt went public with some extremely damaging statements about how, if he hadn't possessed an iron-clad contract, he would have bailed out on the prod...

When a movie is this bad, it's hard to adequately describe its awfulness in words. The temptation exists to write something along the lines of: "Something this horrible has to be seen to be believed." Of course, that kind of advice would lead to ...

Sometimes, it's all a matter of timing, and timing is not in Diary of the Dead's favor. When the movie began making the film festival rounds at the tail end of the summer of 2007, it represented a fresh and invigorating look at an apocalypse - one...

One of the cleverest moments in Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator comes during the first five seconds: a memorial dedication to Kim Jong Il. It's all downhill from there. To be fair, the movie's relentlessly un-PC humor results in some hilarious seq...

Die Hard represents the class of modern action pictures and the standard by which they must be judged. Few films falling into the "mindless entertainment" genre have as much going for them as this movie. Not only is it a thrill-a-minute ride, but...