359 Best Releases Rated R (Page 8)

In Searchlight Pictures' latest, the Asian-centered gay romcom Fire Island, screenwriter and star Joel Kim Booster transports the timeless story of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from Regency England to the famous (or infamous) gay vacation spot. The film follows a group of friends as they face the joys and sorrows of love and found families during a fabulous week on the island. Continue Reading →

CONTENT WARNING: This piece contains frank discussion of suicidal thoughts and ideation. If you find yourself struggling with thoughts of suicide or self-harm, please contact resources such as the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 800-273-8255. Continue Reading →

Did you leave the gas on? Or does this movie stink? I’ll be here all week, folks. Continue Reading →

In the last 15 years since 2008's Taken, Liam Neeson has become an action hero for men over 50. Now 69 years young, Neeson continues to star in these action-focused B-movies, each riffing on the previous one. Steady paychecks seem to be cashed by the Irish actor. Filmmakers line up to direct fights in trains, planes, cars, parking lots, hospitals--anywhere there might be an ounce of criminal activity.   Continue Reading →

Nicolas Cage became a national institution somewhere between stealing Huggies from a convenience store and putting the bunny back in the box. Since then, his career has been a mixture of some highs and many more lows. In the process, he’s gone from one of our most celebrated actors to a self-parody. It’s debatable whether Cage has previously leaned into his own outsized persona, but there’s no question he’s in on the joke with The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.  Continue Reading →

Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District opens on a Parisian building. More specifically, on a young woman named Émilie (Lucie Zhang in her feature debut), a struggling telemarketer, singing naked in her apartment. Next to her is Camille (Makita Samba), a literary professor, her new roommate, new lover, future ex-roommate, and future ex-lover. Broken credits chop up the action, staggered throughout the first lengthy scene. There’s an ephemeral nature to all of it, the sex and romance just as fleeting as the credits only fully shown for a moment, though Audiard has no problem spending longer with the revolving bodies of this story.  Continue Reading →

If the new Mark Wahlberg movie Father Stu were a person, it would have to stay in a confessional for a whole year to list its endless shortcomings. Continue Reading →

If you’re not a skateboarding fan, you’ll likely only be aware that Tony Hawk exists, rather than anything specific about his life or accomplishments. Maybe you’ll know there’s a bunch of video games named for him, or that he appeared in a Police Academy movie. But the fact that you’ve heard of him, even if you wouldn’t know a quad deck from a cheese sandwich, speaks volumes about both his impact, and his role in bringing mainstream respect to a sport once dismissed as a pastime for bored kids and delinquents. Continue Reading →

These days, when confronted with a film made in the past featuring material that comes across as somewhat outre by contemporary standards, it's practically to remark that there's no way such a thing could be made in these comparatively staid times. In the case of Paul Schrader’s Cat People (1982), one comes away from it not only thinking that it couldn’t be made today, but wondering how in the hell it was able to get made back when it did. Bloody, erotic and suffused with a level of kink rarely seen in a putatively mainstream project, this go-for-baroque spectacle was an outlier when it first came out 40 years ago and that feeling remains undiminished to this day, along with its ability to simultaneously raise eyebrows and libidos at every turn. Continue Reading →

There is a movie about metalheads. But not just any devotees to metal music, oh no. This is a film about two musicians in a metal band that love this craft and each other but are struggling to get the fame that’s constantly eluded them. This pair of pals often fight and disagree over where to take their artistic pursuit, but at the end of the day, they’ve got each other and a love for those loud and rebellious melodies. Watching this film, you can’t help but get swept up in the camaraderie and dedication to this craft, even if you don’t know Avenged Sevenfold from Slipknot. Continue Reading →

About an hour into Ambulance, Michael Bay's latest symphony of steel and bullets and explosions, the two brothers-turned-robbers at the center of this tale (Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) take a moment of calm amidst their high-speed run through the alleys and freeways of LA. No, they don't stop driving; they've got a flood of cops on their tail. But the least they can do, with their lives on the line and a cop (Jackson White) bleeding out in the back of their stolen ambulance, is throw on some Airpods and sing along together to Christopher Cross' "Sailing." Continue Reading →

Everything Everywhere All at Once is glorious. Continue Reading →

Robin Williams already proved he could do serious, but in this trio of very different movies released the same year he also did creepy. To watch footage of Robin Williams’ stand-up career is to be both amused, and a little startled. He’s a non-stop joke machine, the words pouring out of his mouth, jumping from subject to subject and impersonation to impersonation. He seems to be a man possessed, jittery, sweating, eyes wide and manic. The obvious explanation was that, up until friend John Belushi’s death in 1982, Williams was famously addicted to cocaine. More than that, though, and what would be the thread that ran through virtually his entire career, was an aggressive, occasionally off-putting need to entertain, at all times. When Williams did comedy, whether on stage or in films, his dial was almost always stuck on 11. Sometimes this frenetic energy worked to excellent effect, such as in Aladdin. But too often it resulted in a run of exhausting yet mediocre movies like Father’s Day, where Williams and co-star Billy Crystal seemed to be engaged in a competition over who could serve up the biggest pile of ham. Even in the relatively charming Mrs. Doubtfire, he’s so relentlessly “on” that you can absolutely understand why Sally Field would divorce him. Williams eventually became synonymous with the image of a desperate for approval theater kid, as presently exhibited by James Corden, only (in Corden’s case) without the talent.   Continue Reading →

During her appearance on Inside the Actors Studio, actress Kate Winslet reenacted a day on the set of Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke! in which Harvey Keitel was a dog. As part of an improvisational exercise to “deepen the intimacy” between the actors, Winslet’s objective was to help the dog to die. Despite her very English hesitations, after many minutes of whimpering and yowling soundtracked by Enya, the canine Keitel finally “dies.” Winslet gracefully excused herself, found a secluded place, and burst into laughter.  Continue Reading →

Andrea Riseborough and Marc Maron shine in a study of a one-time lottery winner years after her life has gone bust. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 South by Southwest Festival) To Leslie tells a story of painful loss and possible redemption as familiar as the ones recounted in the country songs born out of its West Texas setting. In the case of Michael Morris’s feature debut, familiarity does not breed contempt. What To Leslie lacks in originality, it more than makes up for in terms of its craft and very impressive central performances from Andrea Riseborough and Marc Maron.  Continue Reading →

The living legend's vicious physics teacher is the only part of this dark comedy to make the grade. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 South by Southwest Festival) Between the release of a documentary celebrating her long and amazing career and her scene-stealing supporting turn in Spielberg’s adaptation of West Side Story, Rita Moreno definitely had a 2021 for the pop culture ages. Alas, that undeniably welcome career resurgence hits a major hurdle in The Prank, an unspeakably lame mystery-comedy-horror hybrid that director Maureen Bharoocha seemingly devised to answer the question, “What if we took Teaching Mrs. Tingle but made it even stupider?” The result may not be the single worst film in this year’s somewhat lackluster SXSW lineup, but it’s close.  Continue Reading →

Without any awareness of the Hitchcockian tag—impossible, what with it being The Point in the marketing, but let’s try—Windfall is the best advert yet for Ojai, California. Right from the get-go, director and co-writer Charlie McDowell serenely guides viewers around a gorgeous hacienda with an Eden of Pixie tangerines and the Topatopa within eyeshot. In short, this is a fetching property, easily bearing a price tag in the millions. It’s an item someone in the style of our unofficial tour guide (Jason Segel), a daring blend of off-duty Sheriff Hopper and the designer-disheveled-ism of modern tech bros, would possess. Or maybe host the Roys if they are to reattempt family therapy. Continue Reading →

As the discourse rages over how tame the mainstream movie scene can be—with its sexless heroes and bloodless violence—it can be tempting to elevate any film that hearkens back to "the good old days" of sex and slashers just for the sake of its own supposed transgressiveness. But luckily, Ti West's X largely earns that title, a playful and idiosyncratic ode to both ends of the '70s sleaze cinema spectrum (hardcore porn and Wes Craven-esque slashers) alike. Not only that, it's blissfully literate towards its influences, with a nod to larger points about the aesthetics and politics of desire, the fetishization of youth, and so much more. Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 South by Southwest Festival) Continue Reading →

Of all David Lynch’s films, Lost Highway has confounded me since I first saw it 25 years ago. There are movies of Lynch’s that I like less, and movies of his that I’ve shifted my opinions on with time. But in those cases, I always emerged—sometimes dazed—with a grasp on what Lynch was attempting to do with the picture and a good idea of whether he’d successfully done it. Continue Reading →

Is Satanic panic even a thing anymore? When’s the last time we’ve heard anything about backmasking, or songs somehow influencing impressionable teenagers to kill themselves? It’s entirely possible that this is all still a thing, and I’m simply too old and out of touch to know anything about it. B.J. McDonnell’s Studio 666, the feature film debut of Foo Fighters, is a lovingly hokey homage to a time when “the Devil’s music” was such a grave concern for parents (and Tipper Gore) that Congressional hearings were held about it, and lawsuits were filed against heavy metal bands in an attempt to hold them responsible for what was more likely caused by untreated mental illness and drug abuse. Continue Reading →