Roger Ebert Reviews

The doc program at SXSW reflects the left-of-center tone of both the festival and the city of Austin. Where else would you find documentaries about The Butthole Surfers and Carl Lewis in the same program? With such a relatively short festival, it can be hard to get to the non-fiction selections. Still, I was lucky […]

“Steak ‘n Shake has gone Nazi” isn’t a sentence I ever expected to see, much less type. But here we are. On Friday, the social media account of the fast-food chain Steak ‘n Shake published a series of fascist-pandering posts on X (formerly Twitter), then deleted them after public admonishment by everyone who wasn’t a

The SXSW Film Festival launched on Friday night with a star-studded premiere of the new Amazon Prime Video sequel “Another Simple Favor,” followed by the highly anticipated launch of Apple TV+’s “The Studio” at the Paramount and Babak Anvari’s “Hallow Road” across town. Of course, these red-carpet events weren’t alone, as SXSW starts with a

While in London last November 2024, I searched for the latest film releases, as the schedule differs from the US. It was a pleasant surprise to find that “Gladiator II” opened a week earlier than in the United States. However, the real thrill came with the early release of “Paddington in Peru” on November 3rd,

What do “Hercules” (1997), “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939), and “Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, & Blonde” (2003) have in common? They’re all examples of the same archetypal plot structure. Over the years, I’ve observed a pattern in the stories I’ve found the most moving—an archetype I’ve dubbed the Idealist’s Journey. One of the

As the director of Disney+’s coming-of-age drama “Out of My Mind,” Amber Sealey was knee-deep for months in preproduction, as immersed in the creative process as she was in the technicalities that come with helming a film. But when it came to the early moments on set with first-time actress Phoebe-Rae Taylor, who plays a

Cast your mind back to 2017. Following a decade of progress in the US, the first Trump administration had just begun, and the threats to women and Black and brown folks were, at the time, at an all-time high. Coming off the backs of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, resistance was still heady

Ever since Arnold Schwarzenegger donned a bulletproof vest and rifle to rescue his daughter in “Commando,” movies have been clamoring with men—each with their own Liam Neeson–esque “special set of skills”—whose paternal instinct has sent them on increasingly violent quests to protect young girls from the bad guys. The so-named Save the Girl subgenre’s problematic

Thirty-four million one hundred eighty-six thousand six hundred ninety-eight minutes is another way of saying 65 years. Over that time span, Ae-sun and Gwan-sik find more than a million ways to express their adoration, but they rarely say the words. Instead, little by little, with acts of care, loyalty, and fierce protection, they weather all