Roger Ebert Reviews

I can understand a movie not making logical sense. I can even work through a movie lacking emotional sense too. But I can’t stand a film that feels dishonest or reeks of manipulation. It gives me no pleasure to say this, but actress Sanaa Lathan’s cliched, visually inert directorial debut, “On the Come Up,” is […]

From the moment Gina Prince-Bythewood became a director, her strength has always resided in her commitment to love stories. In her films, sumptuous twilight passions happen on a basketball court, they occur between generations, on the ladder rungs of show business, and between immortals. They center Black women carrying power and interiority, while finding strength

The programmers at the first close-to-full TIFF since 2019 decided to open their event this year with a pair of tearjerkers, films that would likely move even the most cynical movie goers. It’s interesting that this year’s fest starts with two films directed by lesser-known filmmakers than the high-profile premieres to come on the weekend,

2022 was my second year back at the Venice Film Festival, after a brief—well, year-long—pause in 2020, when the Festival went on under severely restricted circumstances, one of which had the effect of shutting out U.S. visitors. Last year the day-to-day action felt tentative, wary. Seating was staggered, which put a lot of stress on—and

To diffuse the tension that almost ruined their seemingly flourishing friendship, Bjørn (Morten Burian) and Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) drive to an empty landscape where they unleash their pent-up aggression by screaming at full volume. Liberated, Bjørn believes the animalistic ritual has bonded them, but in truth this outing is the beginning of the end. 

Harry Wootliff’s second feature, “True Things,” with Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke giving two riveting performances, isn’t really an “erotic thriller,” although that term is being bandied about as a descriptor. Yes, there’s a lot of sex in it, and yes, the mood gets very dark. But there isn’t really a “thriller” aspect to the

There’s a sublime sequence that occurs about midway through Juan Pablo González’s narrative debut feature, “Dos Estaciones,” that pivots from the film’s central storyline to follow another inhabitant of Atotonilco el Alto, Jalisco, the Mexican community in which the picture is set and where its director was born and raised. The character, a transgender hairdresser named

Practically from the moment it hit theaters, Neil LaBute’s 2006 remake of the 1973 British folk horror classic “The Wicker Man” has been largely dismissed as one of the worst movies of our time, and of value only to those who make compilation clips of Nicolas Cage at his most unhinged. Sure, it’s no masterpiece. But

It takes a moment, but soon it becomes clear why the somber Czech period epic “Medieval” doesn’t work as a dour post-“Game of Thrones” costume drama. Instead, “Medieval” is a bleak and visually oversaturated allegory about the 15th century revolutionary Czech soldier turned military leader Jan Žižka (Ben Foster). There’s blood and chainmail, yes, but it’s

One of this year’s most disturbing and provocative horror films might make you think twice about traveling abroad.  In Christian Tafdrup’s “Speak No Evil,” a Danish couple vacation in Tuscany with their young daughter, meeting a Dutch couple with a child of their own as both families lounge in the summer sun. After returning home,