ReelViews for PG-13 movies

Numerous movies about grief miss the mark by a wide margin, sliding down a slippery slope of schlocky melodrama with overacting performers failing to convince us that their tears are real. Every once in a while, however, a film gets it right. In ...

Race doesn’t challenge our expectations of what constitutes a competent bio-pic. Opting for a straightforward telling of a (mostly) true story, the filmmakers have moved forward with an abundance of reverence. I’m reminded of 2013’s...

Just because a person’s accomplishments are great, it doesn’t follow that a movie about their life and achievements will be equally as compelling. Many feats and undertakings are not inherently cinematic and, no matter what efforts a filmm...

It has been several years since I've read a book by John Grisham (I believe the last one was The Client). After three or four of Grisham's novels, I grew tired of the predictable repetitiveness and contrived suspense of the narratives. As a resul...

It’s past time for Woody Allen to go gently into retirement. The Oscar-winning director, having made some of the 20th century’s most memorable comedies, has nothing left to prove and his recent output is indicative of someone with no more sto...

Technically, Rampage fits into the “based on a video game” category but, as with most products from the ‘70s and ‘80s (when games weren’t exactly narrative-based), significant changes were applied to make the concept viable for the b...

Taylor Hackford's Ray has a tremendous performance by Jamie Foxx and a soundtrack that is jammed with recordings by the late Ray Charles, but both work in service of a paint-by-numbers screenplay that runs too long and could have been developed in ...

Ready Player One brings back a little of the Old Spielberg Magic. No, this isn’t on the level of a Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a Raiders of the Lost Ark, or an E.T. Instead, it’s akin to Jurassic Park: a special effects-laden actio...

Real Steel, despite being dubbed the "Rock-em/Sock-em Robot movie," seeks to achieve more than such a limiting nickname might imply. A fusion of three popular genres - the father/son relationship movie, the boy-and-his-dog movie, and the sports mov...

1940’s Rebecca was the only Alfred Hitchcock-directed film to win a Best Picture Oscar. Considering the filmmaker’s incredible body of work, that may seem odd, but it’s as much a testimony to the popularity of the source material, Daphe ...