ReelViews for NR movies

Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse, Tokyo Sonata) isn’t known for subtlety or restraint. Although Before We Vanish represents a change-of-pace (a sci-fi film that, as is the case with many sci-fi films, examines the human condition), many of h...

One of the criteria I often use to determine whether a documentary biography is “good” (as opposed to “mediocre”) is whether it provides something beyond what I could find by perusing the Wikipedia article about the subject. In the cas...

Ben-Hur, arguably the most famous Bible-informed epic not to be made by Cecil B. DeMille, is a testimonial to how poorly many spectacles stand the test of time. In its day, Ben-Hur was seen as the ultimate in motion picture entertainment – a...

Perhaps the best way to describe Bernard and Huey is a coming-of-age story in absentia. When we meet the title characters, Bernard (Jim Rash) and Huey (David Koechner), they’re middle-aged men in New York City. Via flashback, we uncover the p...

Wars, no matter when they are fought or which weapons are employed, share many common characteristics. One is that the cheapest currency is human life. Another is that even the winners pay a toll. And a third is that many soldiers, upon returnin...

During the 1940s and 1950s, film noir was one of the most popular Hollywood movie forms. With its roots in both German Expressionism and the American hard-boiled detective fiction of the '20s and '30s, film noir caught on with a public in search o...

Black Girl is the feature debut of acclaimed African author-turned-filmmaker Ousmane Sembene. Clocking in at roughly an hour in length, the movie suffers from a number of what might be considered “teething” flaws: uneven pacing, wooden act...

Watching Black Narcissus without an awareness of the year in which it was made might result in one concluding that it was the product of the 1960s. Many aspects of the production – from the storyline’s sexual undertones to the lush technic...

Audiences today might be tempted to label Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up as a “thriller that doesn’t deliver.” There’s some validity to that charge – if what one expects from a murder mystery is a resolution to the whodunnit? asp...

"I finished shooting The Blue Kite in 1992. But while I was involved in post-production, several official organizations involved with China's film industry screened the film. They decided that it had a problem concerning its political 'leanings,'...