Roger Ebert Reviews

When thinking about the present resurgence of the cinematic hitman, it’s difficult not to immediately think about the legacy of Jean-Pierre Melville. My thoughts on Melville’s impact on the stock character have been percolating through several critics’ mentions of the possible influences from Melville’s “Le Samouraï” on David Fincher’s “The Killer.” In Fincher’s homages, one […]

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I return to a film to discover my initial gut reaction might have been a bit too harsh. When I first watched Sean Wang’s emotionally brutal coming of age film “Didi” at Sundance—where it won the festival’s audience award—I thought his follow-up to his Oscar-nominated animated short (“Nǎi Nai

The suburbs are hell. That’s what the movies keep telling us. Perfect nuclear families living in their McMansions are often anything but perfect. It’s not exactly new cinematic territory, but it’s a well that gets tapped often because it’s just a lot of fun to watch rich families implode, often of their own doing. In

Sharks, while undeniably lethal, are also, studies have shown, kind of dumb. And “The Last Breath” is a cheesy new thriller that is even dumber than a real shark. Not that it features any real sharks — the predatory creatures here are CGI, and hilariously enough, they move through the water faster than the “rage virus”

If you’re a distinguished older male actor in Hollywood, you’re typically cast as Batman’s sidekick or a WWII veteran who escapes from assisted living (Michael Caine), God or a grieving father (Morgan Freeman), a brilliant psychotherapist or Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), an action hero (Tom Cruise), Sigmund Freud and a Roman emperor (Sir Anthony Hopkins), or

Everyone from Shakespeare to Martin Luther to Pier Paolo Pasolini has taken a crack at retelling one or more tales from Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. First published in 1353, the short story collection follows 10 noblemen and women as they flee Black Death-ridden Florence for a secluded villa in Fiesole. Over the course of a

At the Art House Convergence’s recent independent film exhibition conference held in Chicago, Josh Frank, author and urban drive-in entrepreneur, announced his radical initiative for luring people back into theaters: Silent movies. Hold on, hold on, hear him out. “Silents Synced,” scheduled to launch nationally Oct. 4, will present classic silent films synced to seminal

The two-hander is an elegant structure for a lower-budget effort: Just plop two characters together, often in a single location, and let the actors’ performances and the innate tension of the scenario play itself out. It’s a very genre-flexible conceit, malleable enough to fit everything from murderous chamber piece to yakuza thriller to pitch-black tragicomedies starring

Wonder what movies we’ll be talking about during this upcoming Oscar season? A handy cheat-sheet every year is the lineup of the Venice Film Festival, which starts August 28 and is the first of several high-profile fall festivals. Even the 2023 edition, which was hampered by a lack of stars due to the then-ongoing actors’

Taika Waititi, Iain Morris, and Jemaine Clement putting their mark on Monty Python creator Terry Gilliam’s 1981 classic “Time Bandits” is an ambitious scheme in of itself. In recent times, Waititi and Clement’s brand of whimsical comedy, while frequently clever and funny, has become somewhat tiresome. Waititi’s “Next Goal Wins,” which he co-wrote with Morris,