ReelViews for R movies

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...

Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson’s follow-up to 2014’s Inherent Vice, feels a little like a mash-up of Bergman and Hitchcock without the verve of the latter and the subtleties of the former. What begins as a stately costume drama set i...

Phone Booth became one of a number of post-9/11 films to fall victim to an increasing reluctance on the part of motion picture studios to release movies where on-screen events echo real-world tragedies. Joel Schumacher's thriller was originally se...

To lump The Pianist in with all of the other Holocaust stories brought to the screen does a great disservice to this powerful, compelling motion picture. Crafted without a whiff of melodrama, this motion picture takes a steady, unflinching look at...

The Piano is about passion, the most basic and primal element of human nature. No matter how thick the veneer of civilization is, or how deeply-buried beneath layers of social repression those latent emotions are, passion ultimately cannot be deni...

The filmmakers responsible for Pieces of a Woman tout its honest, life-affirming qualities. While no one would debate the former, it’s necessary to come through the narrative’s gauntlet to achieve the latter. This is an emotionally wrenchi...

"There are eight million stories in the naked city. This [is] one of them." That iconic closing line from the TV series Naked City is one of the things I thought of at the beginning of Nicolas Pesce’s Piercing, which shows an art deco versio...

It has been said that the only way to truly enjoy a stoner comedy is to smoke a joint before watching it. Considering the quality of some of the movies wedded to this genre, I'm tempted to believe that. Thankfully, Pineapple Express is an excepti...