383 Best Releases Rated R (Page 4)

This year's TIFF featured three tales of lost souls forging their own paths -- some of them bloodier than others. Tales of transformation are the order of the day at this year's TIFF, signposted by a trio of European films acutely concerned with the struggles women and AFAB people undertake to thrive -- or, in many cases, just survive. Take Héléna Klotz's spellbinding second feature, Spirit of Ecstasy, an icy but enthralling coming-of-age story centered around Jeanne Francoeur (Claire Pommet, best known under her French pop star alias Pomme) a non-binary child of a French gendarme who struggles to break through the glass ceiling of the French wealth management firm they work at as a quantitative analyst. Jeanne cuts a mysterious figure, with their black bob, turquoise suit that acts like armor ("the new proletarian uniform"), the bindings that cut into their skin and make them bleed. At all times, Klotz paints Jeanne as a figure constantly struggling to break free of their environment, whose abusive upbringing in the French gendarmerie barracks pushes them inexorably towards a cutthroat, ambitious business environment ready to chew them up and spit them out at a moment's notice. Continue Reading →

Welcome back to Filmmaker of the Month. In honor of the film, and in its spirit, we sent in a young writer, Megan Sunday, and another young writer, Gena Radcliffe, to do spiritual battle with The Exorcist. Continue Reading →

Friedkin’s second film is a bruising affair that finds the fledgling director wielding style to produce maximum psychological damage. In the early days of his career, William Friedkin found himself playing second banana to his collaborators. For instance, one of his earliest biggest TV directing gigs was on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Then, when he made the leap to feature narrative films, his debut was in service of Cher and Sonny Bono’s cult of personality.  In The Birthday Party, Friedkin’s second film, more well know talent once again eclipses him. Playwright Harold Pinter, whose original stage play the film adapts, also contributed the film script. Even now, the cover of Blu-rays and DVDs, the only way to see it currently, bills it as “Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party.” Continue Reading →

There's more than one transition going on in Park Chan-wook's 2013 thriller Stoker. Yes, the film tells the story of how the seemingly carefree India (Mia Wasikowska) goes from worshipping her father to worshipping her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode). But the Hitchcockian thriller -- and it is one, beyond the shadow of a doubt -- was also Director Park’s first English-language title. Continue Reading →

The plot of Free Fire, in many ways, could not be more straightforward. A mix of thugs, gun runners, and revolutionaries meet up to exchange weapons in a Boston warehouse in the 1970s. Things go wrong in a hurry. Continue Reading →

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn't exist. Continue Reading →

Cory Finley is obsessed with money. His characters have nice things or want them. They live in beautiful houses or enviously plot to get them. Even in the year 2036, with aliens living on (or, more precisely, about two miles above) planet Earth, people still fret over money and try to make scads of it. That’s the state of things in his latest, Landscape with Invisible Hand. It’s a title with the same bespoke aestheticism as the stuffed ocelots and oversized chess pieces his characters own. It feels seemingly designed to scare off less curious viewers. While the film has an awful lot of plot, the undergirding is the same. As in his 2017 debut Thoroughbreds, his follow-up Bad Education, and even his episodes of the abysmal miniseries WeCrashed, the drama comes from the idea of what money does to the soul.   Continue Reading →

Talking animals have been an entertainment staple for practically as long as movies have been around. Most classics of the genre, like 1993’s Homeward Bound, aim squarely at children in the audience. Director Josh Greenbaum’s Strays seeks to subvert that approach by weaving dirty jokes and curse words into familiar genre tropes. The result is considerably more grating and unpleasant to watch.   Continue Reading →

The Last Voyage of the Demeter feels like a movie from a different era. To a point, it is—writer Bragi Schut first drafted his adaptation of the 'Log of the "Demeter"' sequence in Bram Stoker's Dracula in the early 2000s. It's a capital letters Hollywood Creature Feature—a grimmer straight horror cousin to 2004's action/horror hybrid Van Helsing. At its best, it's an admirably gnarly monster flick—bolstered by sturdy craft from director André Øvredal and consistently good performances from a game ensemble. At its worst, it loses confidence and resorts to bumbling attempts to guide its audience by the hand—most notably in its prologue and epilogue. Continue Reading →

Things have been very bad for much of the world for a very long time, and they won’t improve any time soon. I don’t mean to start things off on a bummer note, but to point out that from such dire circumstances comes one benefit: the horror movie renaissance that started in the late 2010s only seems to be getting better. Just this year we’ve gotten the low-fi nightmares Skinamarink and The Outwaters, horror comedy with M3GAN and Cocaine Bear, another mostly solid entry in the Scream franchise, too many indie horror films to list here (Bad Girl Boogey and Brooklyn 45 are but a couple), and the roaring return of the Evil Dead series. Even if there weren’t another release for the rest of the year, it’d still be a great year for horror. Continue Reading →

As horror movies fans, we (and I’m very much including myself here) talk a good game about wanting to see something new and different in the genre, but there are plenty of old reliable tropes that still work with us. Zombies, kaiju, masked killers, all of those have a better than good chance of drawing in audiences, without trying too hard to bring a fresh new angle to anything. We also love child in peril and creepy kid movies, and Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb manages to incorporate both, to mixed results. Continue Reading →

Okay, fine, Bird Box Barcelona isn’t exactly a sequel. It’s more of a continuation, as Netflix gets a belated start on making a franchise out of 2018’s Bird Box, a perfectly fine but unremarkable film that inexplicably became a smash hit. Smash or not, five years is a long time, so you might need a refresher course. Much of Earth’s population has been decimated by malevolent beings with visages so emotionally overwhelming that anyone who looks at them immediately commits suicide, and the survivors are forced to navigate what’s left of the world with their eyes covered, lest they see whatever “they” are. That’s really all you need to remember. Continue Reading →

Director Tyler Spindel's track record is scattered, composed of primarily-for-streaming movies including The Wrong Missy and Father of the Year. He has an affinity for the David Spade experience, in other words. His latest, The Out-Laws, doesn't feature Spade and doesn't do much to suggest that Spindel's body of work will ever grow more than scattered.  Continue Reading →

Joy Ride is a film filled with rude and crude jokes throughout and often fairly ramshackle in its construction. Those with more delicate constitutions may be chagrined to discover it tends to reduce its few Caucasian characters of note to little more than punchlines. It also contains—let me consult the next page of my notes—more big laughs than any other film I’ve seen so far this year. Plus, carefully layered among its more outrageous elements, you’ll find a surprising amount of heart. The result is both a genuine delight and a wonderful alternative to the soul-deadening blockbusters that have glutted multiplexes this summer.   Continue Reading →

One of the things I enjoy most about the moviegoing experience is coming out of a film feeling as if I've actually learned something that I didn't know before, or had not even occurred to me in the first place. That's exactly the feeling that I got while watching Sam Pollard’s The League, a documentary about the history of Negro baseball leagues in America. Going in, I suppose I knew the basics about the subject and could name such key figures as Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige, but Pollard, who previously directed MLK/FBI, and executive producer Questlove delve much deeper, and the results are indeed fascinating. Continue Reading →

I was a latecomer to The Room, not seeing it for the first time until 2010, long after its initial, extremely short-lived theatrical release and then its designation, spearheaded by, among others, Patton Oswalt, David Cross, and Paul Rudd, as a genuine pop culture oddity. I only had some vague idea of what it was about (and its off-putting poster art, featuring it's Kubrick-staring writer/director/star Tommy Wiseau, offered no clues), but I was also a fan of cinematic endurance tests and thought that I should see what the big deal was. Continue Reading →

Near the homestretch of John Slattery’s small-town dipshit crime saga, Maggie Moore(s), a police chief (Jon Hamm), chides his colorfully quippy co-worker (Nick Mohammed) with the overly direct criticism that he has “no concept of when it’s ok to tell a joke.” It’s an understandable retort given the morbidity of their current case—two women with the same name gruesomely killed a few days apart, one dispatched in a way that could be legally described as murder by arson.   Continue Reading →

As big tent blockbusters like superhero movies and other franchise fare battle it out for screens and box office returns, the traditional mid-budget comedy has become increasingly rare. With adult comedies squeezed off the schedule, there are far fewer opportunities for performers who don’t want to don a cape or end up described as “the live-action version” of a cartoon. That’s part of what makes Gene Stupnitsky’s No Hard Feelings such a breath of fresh air.  Continue Reading →

As far back as the propagandistic days of 1936’s Reefer Madness, the onscreen adventures of those hooked on marijuana have long been a man’s domain. This boys club of bud appreciation has provided men a cinematic space to roll a joint, puff away, and ruminate on the inner machinations of, primarily cis-hetero masculinity; girl trouble, career stagnation, societal infantilization, and the general inadequacy of one’s day-to-day existence. That puff of reefer is enough to lower the mind’s defenses and reach an emotional cavalcade that unlocks heartbreak and humor in equal measure. Thus, the “stoner comedy” was born. Continue Reading →

“A heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki,” The Doom Generation’s opening credits read. It’s the first of many jokes for Araki’s first film with a crew, shot for $1 million in January of 1994. None of the humor is apathetic, though. It’s like its characters in that way: caustic, yes, even to a fault at points. But the kids at the center of The Doom Generation aren’t apathetic, at least not at the beginning. They’re a conceptual trio of id, ego, and superego filtered through Araki’s lens to serve the narrative, an anti-American mind due to their identities and personal lives. But as they realize their selves individually and as a whole, their heterosexual, monogamous environment relegates them to sameness.  Continue Reading →

The Blackening is a horror-satire based on a popular 2018 short film of the same name. It mercilessly skewered the genre conceit that the Black character is always the first to die—a notion so familiar that this year saw the publication of an examination of Black-related horror films entitled The Black Guy Dies First. To do so, it presented a scenario in which all the potential victims are Black. They argue about who among them is truly the Blackest while downplaying their own ethnicity to survive. (“I qualified for the Winter Olympics.”) Continue Reading →