ReelViews for R movies

The film with the loudest buzz at the 2008 Toronto Film Festival was Darren Aranofsky's The Wrestler - quite a change for the man who brought The Fountain to the same venues a couple of years ago to almost universal indifference. The Wrestler, on ...

Is there romance in the afterlife? Does the heart still burn with yearning after it no longer beats? Wristcutters: A Love Story, with a title that easily passes the "truth in advertising" test, would like us to believe so. While the landscape may...

X is a fun movie – a throwback to the Grindhouse pictures of the 1970s and the slasher genre of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. With a tongue-in-cheek, devil-may-care approach, writer/director Ti West embraces many of the tropes that have sinc...

As a writer by trade (at least before he started directing), David Koepp should know that a good ending is at least as important as a good beginning, if not more so.  You Should Have Left, a haunted house movie that doubles as an homage to St...

Some movies you love from the first minute of the first reel. For others, it can take a little longer. You Won’t Be Alone falls in the latter category but rewards those who stick with it. An art-horror film that cares more about aesthetics and e...

Diablo Cody has a distinctive voice. You can hear it in Juno. You can hear it in Jennifer's Body. You can hear it in United States of Tara. And you can hear it in Young Adult. After a while, however, the uniqueness of what Cody has to say and how ...

For his second feature, director Neil LaBute ventures across a domestic landscape that is no less dark than the world of corporate backstabbing he visited with In the Company of Men. Those looking for something lightweight or feel-good need not bo...

When assessing the small motion picture sub-genre of the "fantasy comedy," it's necessary to acknowledge that the impregnable pinnacle is occupied by Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride, a classic whose prominence may never be challenged. Your Highnes...

Watching Youth, you’d swear Fellini had risen from his grave and returned to make another movie. With minimal narrative thrust, this film gets by on its spellbinding images, superior acting, and dreamlike tone. Most movies tell a story; Youth i...

From the beginning, it's apparent that there's something "off" about Youth in Revolt. It's not that the film is fatally flawed, but the tone is uneven, the satire is blunt, the comedy rarely generates more than feeble laughs, and the lead characte...