ReelViews for R movies

For his directorial debut, Russell Crowe has attempted to tell a tale of war, tragedy, loss, romance, and healing. The results of his overreaching are evident early on and the final production is so jammed with subplots and secondary characters that ...

Disaster movies have always been popular, but I’ll leave it to psychologists to determine the reason why viewers react positively to tales of mayhem and catastrophe. The making of a disaster movie offers its creators an unusual set of challenge...

The Way Back conflates a sports movie with the tale of an alcoholic struggling to overcome his addiction. It plays out a little like a cross between Hoosiers and Manchester by the Sea. Although director Gavin O’Connor and writer Brad Ingelsb...

We Are Your Friends is presented in three very different acts. The first is at times fresh and inventive, with playful elements that enliven the narrative. The second is solid but familiar. The third is meandering and strangely unsatisfying, even tho...

I have never been a fan of big, bold tearjerkers – the kind that often function equally well as motion pictures or commercials for Kleenex. Despite great, lived-in performances from lead actors Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, We Live in Time ...

Tilda Swinton is a chameleon unafraid of any subject matter, no matter how hard-hitting or difficult. She has appeared in one of the most emotionally crushing films I have ever seen, Tim Roth's The War Zone, and her performance in We Need to Talk a...

Loyalty. Betrayal. Violence. Family. Those are the crucial staples to be found in any crime drama worth viewing, and writer/director James Gray shoehorns them into his high wattage effort, We Own the Night. Despite a plot that occasionally creaks...

In some ways, the 1980s represent the perfect era in which to set a slasher – recent enough for the societal norms to be recognizable but prior to the advent of such plot twist-busting devices like the cellphone and the Internet. Mark Meyers...

Of all the cast members of the former Friends, Jennifer Aniston is by far the most successful. But there's no correlation between "success" and "quality." For a while, Aniston showed a willingness to try different things and experiment (her high po...

Reaction to The Weather Man may depend upon an individual's ability to tolerate spending 100 minutes in the company of an unpleasant protagonist. There's no doubt this can be an uncomfortable experience, but it can also be rewarding for those who ...