ReelViews for R movies

Larry Flynt, the self-proclaimed king of smut, as an American hero? Unlikely as it may seem, that's the scenario set up and successfully pursued by Milos Forman's (One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Amadeus) latest venture, The People vs. Larry Flynt...

In 2018, vigilantism is all the rage. I wonder whether that says something about our current culture or whether it’s just something Hollywood has latched onto as a way of making a buck. Peppermint is the third such high-profile film to come t...

There are times when a filmmaker tries so hard to surprise everyone that he ends up surprising no one. Such is the case with A Perfect Getaway, a film that exists for one reason: the twist. Writer/director David Twohy (Pitch Black) puts so much e...

The premise underlying Perfect Sense is too delicious to ignore and, perhaps, too monumental for any motion picture to live up to. Consider a disease that robs its victims of their senses one-by-one. There is a lull in between each escalation - lon...

What would happen if a late-night, D-grade direct-to-cable thriller excised all of the raunchily enjoyable elements and managed to attract an A-list cast? The result might be shockingly like Perfect Stranger, a movie so inane that it fails to rise...

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is beautiful in its ugliness. Among other things, it features gorgeously composed scenes of maggots, animal entrails, and human corpses. And, in direct contrast to Marie Antoinette, it portrays 18th century France...

This review contains spoilers. Oblique spoilers, but spoilers nonetheless.Although technically classified as “horror” or a “thriller”, Personal Shopper works best when viewed as a mood piece. There’s something hypnotic about the way ...

It’s hard to assign a rating to something like Pet Sematary. This new adaptation of the popular Stephen King novel matches the book when it comes to dread and nihilism. Bad things happen to good people with no hope of redemption, salvation, o...

With his third directorial effort, Kenneth Branagh (who has already done the Shakespearean Henry V and the noir thriller Dead Again) sets his sights a smaller sort of picture. Peter's Friends is a slice-of-life movie that illustrates the reunion o...

With a title like Phantom, one might easily assume that this movie is a ghost story. In actuality, however, it's a submarine thriller loosely based on actual events from 1968. The tale told by Phantom falls into the realm of "historical fiction." A...