ReelViews for R movies

Ari Aster, the director of Hereditary and Midsommar, has described his brand of filmmaking as “existential horror.” To be sure, it’s a much different breed of the genre than one typically finds in multiplexes, trading in jump scares for ...

Following the spectacular failure of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, Kenneth Branagh returned to England to make the kind of film he was most familiar with: a very British, low-budget production rooted deeply in the works of William Shakespeare. Howe...

It's refreshing to see a movie in which there are no special effects, no camera tricks, and no incidental music to strum on a viewer's emotional strings. These are some (but certainly not all) of the tenets of Dogma 95, the much-ballyhooed "cinema...

The film opens in an amphitheater in Greece, with an appropriately-garbed Greek chorus chanting of the deeds of Achilles and Oedipus. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the masked men and women decide to switch to the tale of Lenny Weinrib (Woody Allen) -- d...

Most world renowned people have achieved that status as a result of something accomplished during their lives. Unfortunately, Daniel Pearl was among the few who became famous as a result of his death. Pearl's kidnapping and subsequent death at the...

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates exemplifies what passes for “raunchy comedy” these days: plenty of vulgarity and profanity without many accompanying laughs. In trying to push the R-rated envelope, filmmakers have become so focused on bei...

For some reason, there has been a move by a few critics to politicize their reviews of Mile 22, Peter Berg’s tightly-constructed espionage thriller. I guess one side-effect of living in a hyper-partisan era is that some films aren’t allowe...

30 years have passed since the assassination of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and, the ballot passage of California's recent Proposition 8 notwithstanding, advances have been made in the area of gay rights, although there are still many hurd...

Miller’s Crossing, the Coen Brothers’ third film (following Blood Simple and Raising Arizona) introduced the kind of comedically-tinged approach they would employ for some of their darkest and most compelling films, including the criticall...

It would be inaccurate to claim that A Million Ways to Die in the West is devoid of humor. It isn't. However, Seth MacFarlane's hit-and-miss spoof of Westerns has far more "misses" than "hits" and the actor-director-writer (Ted) doesn't seem to rea...