ReelViews for R movies

Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, which won the Golden Palm Award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, is the quintessential art film: slow, demanding, and rewarding for those willing to put forth the intellectual effort necessary to puzzle out its a...

The Whole Nine Yards suffers from split personality syndrome - it's a strange hybrid of film noir and comedy. At first, this might not seem like an unusual approach, until you recall that most movies of this ilk are satires. That's not what's goi...

I’m not going to lie. I laughed - just not as frequently or as hard as I would have liked to.  Why Him? contains its share of effective humor, both of the clever and raunchy kinds, but it also suffers from two malaises that infect many mod...

As a comedy, Wicked Little Letters hits many of the right notes, although the satirical elements are often presented too bluntly to lacerate with maximum effect. As a mystery, however, it is less than impressive. The whodunnit? aspect is revealed ...

The Wicker Man is an early '70s British export that criss-crosses genres as easily as it confounds audience expectations. A film that defies categorization, The Wicker Man can be considered to be a horror film, a psychological thriller, a musical,...

Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) is a career criminal – a thief so meticulous that he has operated for thirty years without being caught. He plans each job ahead, writing all the details in a notebook, and leaves nothing to chance. But fate catc...

Watching The Wife, I was reminded of how movies used to be. Back in the 1990s, something like this would have been common: an engaging story anchored by two powerful performances. Glenn Close is as good as she has ever been (although I would p...

This is Reese Witherspoon's big Oscar push and the strength of her performance - easily the most forceful and memorable aspect of an otherwise unremarkable motion picture - may well earn her a nomination. Witherspoon certainly goes all-out, doing...

Violence comes in many shapes, sizes, and forms. Twenty-six years ago, when Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch was first released, it caused a stir because of its gritty, uncompromising style. The deaths in this film are neither sterile nor heroic. W...

Damian Harris’ The Wilde Wedding is a delightfully loopy comedy about the hijinks that occur when families collide and intermingle at the fourth wedding of international film star Eve Wilde (Glenn Close). Weddings are, of course, beloved by ...