ReelViews for NR movies

The era of the Universal classic monster movies lasted from 1931, when the studio released Dracula (featuring Bela Lugosi’s iconic portrayal), until 1948 when Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein took the venerable horror figures into parod...

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...

Growing up in New Jersey, I was of course aware of the existence of Action Park, an amusement park located in the northwestern portion of the state, not far from where my grandparents lived. Nevertheless, I turned down opportunities to visit for a...

Upon its release in 1984, Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense was hailed by many critics as the "greatest concert film of all time." The movie, which captured a live concert performance given by the Talking Heads, used state-of-the-art direct-t...

Paul Roland’s Exemplum opens with a definition (not a bad idea considering how obscure the term may be to all but classical literature scholars): “EXEMPLUM: 1. An example or model. 2. An anecdote that illustrates or supports a moral point, as ...

Although some aspects of RRR may seem foreign to mainstream North American movie-goers, the meat of the tale – an epic adventure featuring two mighty figures – is the kind of thing that American motion pictures used to do well. RRR tosses asid...

Throughout his legendary career, Akira Kurosawa showed an affinity for the works of William Shakespeare. Three of his films in particular – The Bad Sleep Well, Throne of Blood, and Ran – owe a debt to The Bard even though not a line of Shakesp...

You Don’t Nomi is a 2019 documentary that takes a fond look back at the deservedly derided Paul Vehoeven/Joe Eszterhas box office bomb, Showgirls. Although director Jeffrey McHale approaches the retrospective from a decidedly subjective poin...

When one considers movies and pies, the first title likely to come to mind is American Pie, one of the defining comedies of the 1990s. Although Joshua Lester’s 2021 feature debut isn’t going to change that, the indie rom-com offers a different...

How does one go about reviewing a movie that is as widely considered “the worst movie ever made” as Citizen Kane is deemed to be the best? It’s especially difficult when one considers that the film’s reputation dwarfs its reality. It h...