Roger Ebert Reviews

It’s hard to think of a contemporary mainstream male filmmaker who consistently writes better female characters than Alex Garland. Before his directorial career began, he primarily focused on stories about men: his novel The Beach (which was adapted for the Leonardo DiCaprio film) and the screenplays to “28 Days Later,” “Sunshine” and “Dredd.” It certainly […]

“What made you talk to them?” “Still kinda putting that together in my own mind.” That really is the impossible question at the center of HBO’s wildly influential “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” isn’t it? Why did Robert Durst talk to Andrew Jarecki? What compelled a man who had seemingly gotten

For the past twenty-five years, Chaz Ebert and the College of Media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have hosted the Ebertfest Film Festival at the Virginia Theatre in Champaign, Illinois. Roger Ebert was the first Film Critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for film criticism. He held his colleagues in esteem. Since his death, Chaz Ebert

The fact-based “Hard Miles” begins with a failure. Social worker Greg Townsend (Matthew Modine) urges a judge to allow the resident of a facility for teenage boys who have been in trouble to allow him to stay there, even though he pushed another boy. Townsend explains that he was protecting someone else, not instigating violence.

At the end of “The Beekeeper,” an amazing thing happens: they fade to black and roll the credits. I saw the film earlier this year (it’s on home video now and worth $5) and was slightly flummoxed. Written and directed by David Ayer (“Fury“), it stars Jason Statham as a former commando turned vigilante waging violent warfare against

“The Hands of Orlac,” a twisty and lurid 1924 Austrian psychodrama, was the last movie I saw in New Orleans at the Overlook Film Festival. The four day-long festival’s revival of the century-old silent movie, about a celebrated pianist who believes he’s haunted by the spirit of a killer, felt like an event thanks in

Despite its gently bummed-out vibe, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is a sneakily powerful film. It’s so affecting, in fact, that I get a little sad just thinking about the story and characters. Even though I saw “Eternal Sunshine” twice in a theater when it came out and put it on my 2004 Top

Just when you think they’ve run out of real-life World War II stories to turn into blockbuster movies than some documents get declassified, inspiring or at least suggesting new sagas of heroism. This new movie about a small mission of Allied fighters killing Nazis on a grand scale wherever they go, directed by Guy Ritchie

If the 2020s were going to be any film subgenre, they would be body horror. It’s a genre preoccupied with testing the limits, pleasures, and possibilities of the flesh. It also has a streak of fear under the radical physical transformations it showcases: the loss of bodily autonomy. The fear of losing control of your

How will you respond if you are evaluated for another life after your death? “Nine Days” is a little but poignant fantasy drama film which throws that thought-provoking question and some other interesting ones involved with life and humanity. When I watched it for the first time around the end of 2021, I was initially