ReelViews for NR movies

When one considers the films that won the Best Picture Oscar in the decade from 1956 through 1965, it’s evident that the Academy favored two kinds of productions: spectacles and musicals. During that span, there were two outliers: 1960’s T...

The Tracey Fragments uses its non-standard visual style, a split-screen approach that can show from one to sixteen frames at any one time, in a vain attempt to camouflage the paucity of the story. Director Bruce McDonald, working from a script by ...

(Spoilers.)“The love of money is the root of all evil.” So says the Bible. So also says B. Traven, the mysterious author whose novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre became the source material for director John Huston’s 1948 adaptation. ...

Two of the most enjoyable disaster films I have seen in the past half-dozen years have emerged not from the powerhouse studios in Hollywood but from Norway. The first was the 2015 tsunami movie, The Wave, and the second was released in 2019 (b...

Spoilers! Yeah, I talk about the ending. Although the name makes it sound like a monster movie (which it could be, after a fashion), Tyrannosaur is actually a member of a peculiar class of film unique to the U.K.: the "feel bad" tale of working...

History has decreed that Umberto D., a 1952 film from celebrated Italian director Vittorio De Sica, is one of the best representations of neo-realism committed to film. (Ingmar Bergman called it a “favorite movie” and Martin Scorsese labeled i...

By the 1990s, the movie musical has become a dead art form. Four recent revival attempts have not been met enthusiastically. The first two, Newsies and Sarafina, went to video after approximately one-week theatrical runs (even the Disney name c...

Un Air de Famille, the fourth film from French director Cedric Klapisch, is a study of a dysfunctional family on the verge of blowing apart. While this isn't exactly an original topic, Klapisch's approach is vastly different from what we have come...

In addition to being employer and employee, Stephane (Daniel Auteuil) and Maxime (Andre Dussollier) share an intimate friendship. Stephane works for Maxime at an exclusive Paris violin repair shop. One evening, while the two are at dinner, Maxime...

Death: it is the lone certainty in life (forget the bit about taxes). Despite that, when the end comes to a loved one, even if expected, it can be difficult to process and handle. The situation is even more dramatic in cases when a death occurs a...