ReelViews for NR movies

Kings and Queen, the 2004 film by French director Arnaud Desplechin, is wending its way slowly across North America, making its way into select art houses. The movie is quintessentially French, focusing on drama instead of melodrama and character ...

Sexual taboos come in all shapes and forms -- bestiality, pedophilia, incest -- but none creates a more vivid image than that of necrophilia. So, when I say that Kissed is the character study of a necrophiliac, recognize that this film is intended...

Kodachrome is proof of the concept that solid direction and superlative acting can transform even a mediocre script into something worth watching. At its heart, Kodachrome is a middling road picture – a film whose every plot point is predict...

Koyaanisqatsi, Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 cult classic, is almost hypnotic in the fascination it exerts. Merging a collage of images of ‘80s Americana with Philip Glass’ now-dated score (which bears more than a passing resemblance to the film...

This review contains spoilers, if that term can be used for a movie that has been around for 85 years!While I’ll admit that Jean Vigo’s 1934 feature, L’Atalante, is charming, I won’t be among those who label it as one of the great cinemati...

One of the most consistent makers of excellent motion pictures during the 1980s and 1990s has been Ken Loach. With a resume highlighted by such unforgettable titles as Hidden Agenda, Riff-Raff, Raining Stones, and Ladybird, Ladybird, Loach is reco...

The most noteworthy thing about The Last Broadcast has nothing to do with The Blair Witch Project (more about this later). Instead, although most movie-goers are probably unaware of this, The Last Broadcast became the first feature-length motion p...

If one was to clump together all the movies – both narrative and documentary – made about the Vietnam War (or, as it’s called in Asia, the American War), the number would be in the three-digit range. I have seen many of those (although b...

The difficulty with making a thriller based on actual events is that aspects of the film are often at cross-purposes. There’s a little of this going on in Eduardo Mendoza’s 2017 feature, The Last Hour, but, on balance, the historical elemen...

Director Catherine Breillat is known for her racy and sometimes sexually explicit movies, many of which deal with themes of female empowerment. She has built a reputation in France as a woman for whom no subject is taboo. Her films have depicted ...