ReelViews for R movies

If I were to rank The Big Lebowski, I’d place it in the upper-middle tier of the Coen Brothers’ catalog. It remains one of their most oft-quoted works and arguably their biggest cult classic. A showcase of offbeat humor—some of it genuinely ...

Let me be upfront and admit to admiring the artistry and audacity of Maggie Gyllenhaal's overhaul of James Whale's 1935 classic, The Bride of Frankenstein. This film refuses to be ignored, pulsing with a manic, punk-rock energy. Unfortunately, in t...

Is this really the end of The Conjuring franchise? What began as a one-off haunted house movie in 2013 has since spawned sequels and spin-offs at a pace that would make other horror series envious. But as the creative spark faded and many of the o...

Note: I have avoided explicit spoilers in this review but there's only so much hinting I can do while still making points. From Norwegian writer/director Kristoffer Borgli, the creative mind behind the surreal Dream Scenario, comes The Dra...

When one approaches something like The Housemaid, one has to go with reasonable expectations. Freida McFadden's book, a perfect summer beach read, is the kind of page-turner that can easily be consumed in a few lengthy sessions. Transforming it fr...

The Long Walk represents one of Stephen King's rare ventures outside the horror genre. A dystopian thriller, the film adaptation alternates between lengthy, dialogue-driven sequences and sudden bursts of graphic violence. At times, it feels almost...

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is a three-hour refutation of James Cameron's fallacious assertion that 3-D is necessary for complete cinematic immersion. On even a conventional screen, Nolan's reworking of Homer's epic tale towers over the audien...

The Roses is not a remake of the 1989 film The War of the Roses, which starred Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito (and was directed by DeVito), although both movies draw from the same source material: Warren Adler’s novel. Di...

First thing’s first: this is not a remake of the 1987 film of the same name starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The two are connected only insofar as each claims to be an adaptation of the 1982 Stephen King novel. In the case of the first movie, simi...

The Smashing Machine is one of those biopics that falls into the trap of trying to do too much within a limited span of time. The tapestry woven by writer/director Benny Safdie is so dense that he might have had a better chance of realizing his vi...