ReelViews for R movies

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 ...

Wildling starts out strongly but the qualities that make the first 20 minutes engrossing and harrowing drain away and the movie morphs into a thoroughly unsatisfying excursion into fantasy-tinged horror. As directed by first time feature film...

Anyone who has seen either Sicario or Hell or High Water, the two previous scripts credited to writer/director Taylor Sheridan, should have a good idea what to expect tonally from Wind River. Sheridan doesn’t write happy, escapist fantasies...

Winter Passing is a classic example of a pedestrian motion picture being lifted out of mediocrity by an arresting lead performance. Zooey Deschanel doesn't just elevate Winter Passing; she carries it. There are other things to be said in favor of...

Winter's Bone offers a case study in the essential philosophical differences between independent motion picture thrillers and Hollywood/mainstream ones. The third feature from director Debra Granik and winner of two awards at the 2010 Sundance Fil...

If all it took was verisimilitude and atmosphere to define a movie, The Witch would earn a near-perfect rating. Unfortunately, despite a creepily effective setting and authentic setup, the movie suffers as a result of a frustratingly uneven screenpla...

Technically, the full title of Without Remorse is Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse. However, any similarities between the film version (credited to Taylor Sheridan and Will Staples) and Clancy’s novel are seemingly coincidental. This is a comp...