ReelViews for R movies

At first glance, Inherent Vice might seem to be a detective story. Look a little closer, however, and it becomes clear that this is Paul Thomas Anderson's idea of a comedy. There's slapstick, lowbrow material, and enough strange characters an...

Roughly 20 minutes into Inheritance, I was hooked. Despite the overzealousness of director Vaughn Stein’s intercutting when attempting to ratchet up the suspense during an early sequence, the film exhibits a fast pace and the story offers an...

Sometimes with horror movies, it's all about tone. The apprehension and dread one feels while watching a good horror film cannot easily be manufactured and some filmmakers incorrectly believe that gore and special effects pave the path. The Innkeep...

Innocent Voices tells a very personal story wrapped within a larger political context. Based on the memoirs of co-writer Oscar Orlando Torres, the film hearkens back to the 1980s and the brutal civil war that devastated El Salvador. Much like in ...

A perusal of the Coen Brothers' filmography reveals a penchant for the offbeat and absurd. They almost never do anything conventional, which makes Inside Llewyn Davis surprising. A Valentine to late-'50s and early-'60s folk music (pre-Dylan), the m...

With so much talent involved - both in front of and behind the camera - one has a right to anticipate something special from Inside Man. Does it deliver? Spike Lee's latest joint is a workmanlike thriller that provides solid performances; a mixtur...

The International possesses the look and feel of a thriller, but not the heart or soul of one. With a cold, clinical precision, director Tom Tykwer establishes the complex narrative and weaves in a few extraneous action sequences, but it's an exerc...

Interview is a remake of the 2003 Theo Van Gogh film of the same name. Van Gogh, who was murdered in 2004 by a Muslim extremist, had planned to helm the English-language version himself. In his absence, Steve Buscemi stepped in. The finished prin...

Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. Mike Nicols' Wolf. Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein. Suddenly, horror of the old genre (as opposed to the '80s slasher flicks) is back with a vengeance. The latest, and arguably the most ambitious, to enter this p...

There's something seductive about the idea of turning one's back on civilization and all its trappings. Many of us entertain this thought during a daydream or in those gentle minutes between wakefulness and sleep, but we don't view it as the act of...