ReelViews for R movies

During the Spring of 1990, I remember being transfixed in front of the television set for an hour each Sunday night over a period of five weeks. The occasion was the "Masterpiece Theater" presentation of the British mini-series "Traffik", a comple...

A wonderful thing about Shakespeare’s canon is that those plays can form the vehicles by which any director’s unique vision can emerge. Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, and Kenneth Branagh all recognized this. With The Tragedy of Macbeth, Joel ...

Arriving in theaters two weeks late but otherwise unscathed is Antoine Fuqua's Training Day, the story of an idealistic young cop who gets a hard lesson about life in the streets from a veteran. Shining with the star power of Denzel Washington (pla...

Next to Independence Day, Trainspotting may be the most hyped motion picture of the summer. Miramax Films, the distributor that saturated the market with ads for The Crying Game in 1992- 93 and Pulp Fiction in '94, has struck again. Trainspotti...

When one considers the impact Judd Apatow has had on the movie scene over the past decade, it's surprising to realize that Trainwreck is only his fifth feature as a director. This also marks his return to the romantic comedy genre after a two-fil...

Trance is a member of the movie category defined by the likes of Shutter Island and Inception - films in which the concept of "reality" is flexible and the reliability of the narrative is indeterminate. Even at the end, once all has been explained ...

As much heralded, "edgy" movies go, Transamerica fails to live up to expectations. The final 30 minutes are interesting, funny, and affecting, but that segment represents less than a third of the running time. To get to the parts of the film that...

The Transporter movies remind me of the Bond films of the '70s and '80s, in which each new installment tried to one-up its predecessor in terms of inventive and outrageous action set pieces. Without a doubt, Transporter 3 offers more innovative wa...

Spoiler warning: Technically, this review contains spoilers. But does anyone really care? By writing this, I am reviewing a direct-to-DVD movie. True, Trespass is opening in a select number of theaters in mid-October 2011 (the word "select" bein...

The events depicted in The Trial of the Chicago 7 occurred in 1968-69. Aaron Sorkin began working on the screenplay in 2007. But, oh how relevant the story chronicled in this movie feels today... What is it that George Santayana wrote in The L...