Roger Ebert Reviews

There’s an ongoing theme in Alexander Payne’s films — the people we think are the antagonists aren’t actually bad people; we simply force ourselves into the corner of seeing them that way. From the simple-minded and unfortunately coiffed future in-laws in “About Schmidt” to the adulterous characters in “Sideways” and “The Descendants,” to the animosity of […]

By now, we’re all aware that Elisabeth Moss can do anything. She’s proven it again and again in film and television. However, seeing the star of “Mad Men” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” play a suave super-spy with a British accent in the opening scenes of FX’s “The Veil” is initially off-putting. Really? It’s not just

A weak year for video games so far should get a little bit of a jolt from Sony and Shift Up’s “Stellar Blade,” available this week exclusively on the PS5. Inspired by all kinds of post-apocalyptic gaming, it sometimes feels like a blend of “The Last of Us,” “Fallout,” and “Final Fantasy,” and those influences

There are windows throughout “Nowhere Special,” real and symbolic. Over the opening credits, we view windows, giving us glimpses of the outside and a couple of interiors in a rural Irish town. One of those windows is being carefully soaped and squeegeed by John (James Norton). He smiles at a black and white cat on

David Proval, now 81, is a native New Yorker who has collected a diverse array of screen credits over the past half-century, including the terrifying New Jersey hoodlum Richie Aprile on “The Sopranos,” Toby Ziegler’s rabbi on the NBC series “The West Wing,” and character parts in everything from TV’s “Miami Vice,” “Picket Fences” and “Everybody Loves Raymond”

Every genre has a moment, usually dating back to silent film, where you can start to see it crystallize before your very eyes. Science fiction has “A Trip to the Moon,” the American Western has “The Great Train Robbery,” and even the mob movie has “The Musketeers of Pig Alley.” Until “Girl Shy,” starring silent

Love songs can be so trite. Rom-coms can be so formulaic. Because we spend much of our lives thinking about love, it’s no surprise that artists are similarly obsessed with matters of the heart. Yet so many of their efforts are dreadful. Chalk it up to how subjective one’s feelings on romance can be. Some

The Academy’s Board of Governors has approved awards rules and campaign promotional regulations for the 97th Academy Awards.  Many of these changes feel both like revisions to pandemic-era exceptions, as well as reactions to recent qualms about qualifying periods for new releases and, most significantly, the Best Original Score category. Let’s take a look at the biggest changes.

After two “Sonic the Hedgehog” movies that involved Hollywood court ordering the blue blur to do the same mundane story as every popular property does by shipping him to Earth and spewing pop culture references as the basis of humor, it’s come to the point that Sonic fans, young and old, might develop Sonicholm Syndrome.

For the past twenty-seven years the San Francisco Silent Film Festival has unearthed treasures from the silent film era and presented them with context and curation for audiences of the City by the Bay. Over the decades the festival has grown from presentation only to an organization that helps restore and preserve this fragile art.