ReelViews for R movies

Fargo takes the usual "caper gone wrong" storyline and applies a new twist. Based on a supposed series of "true events" from 1987 (a tongue-in-cheek claim made by a screen caption), the film examines what can happen when the police and criminals a...

The idea underlying Fast Food Nation is intriguing: take the premise of the best-selling non-fiction book by Eric Schlosser and convert it into the backstory of a fictional film. Where director Richard Linklater runs into trouble is in the executi...

Because Fast Times at Ridgemont High arrived in movie theaters during the height of the '80s "teenspoitation" era, it has often been unfairly lumped together with Porky's and its successors and copycats. In reality, Fast Times is smarter and more per...

With a title like Faster, it has to be a balls-to-the-walls action flick, right? Although that's how George Tillman Jr.'s feature is being marketed, that's not what it is. Faster is a revenge thriller that's more interested in delving into the da...

I’m willing to admit that perhaps my expectations were too high for this twisted, offbeat Christmas movie. But, when one considers the title and the premise – Mel Gibson playing a disgruntled, gun-toting Santa Claus – is it any wonder th...

With a sly wit and a dark edge, director Yorgos Lanthimos plunges into the murky waters of early 1700s British politics, where few positions were more enviable and less stable than being the queen’s favorite (or, in Brit-speak, “favourite�...

It's too bad the title The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly was already taken, because it would have been the perfect moniker for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Terry Gilliam's adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's book (emphasis on "the bad and the ugly"...

Feardotcom is a “ghost in the machine” movie, I guess. I can’t say for certain because the story is so confused and contradictory that it’s impossible to make sense of what’s going on. It hurts to search for logic in the wreckage of ...

Zero-star movies are a rare and terrifying breed - films that warrant recommendation only as an alternative to physical distress. Sitting in a theater as one of these examples of cinematic diarrhea unspools creates a curious tug-of-war within the ...

Feast of July, which arrives under the Merchant/Ivory umbrella (Ismail Merchant having served as executive producer), is much like a big screen version of a double-length Masterpiece Theater episode. By turns tragic and beautiful, but always atmos...