Roger Ebert Reviews

As a companion to our beloved feature on great performances, we asked our writers this year to pick out any non-acting element of the year they wanted to highlight. It could be editing, costume design, score, etc. And the responses were fantastic, assembled in the feature below. Again, this is not meant to be comprehensive. […]

19th-century Austrian monarch Empress Elisabeth of Austria was so well-liked in her time that she’s been portrayed in comics, theater, film, and television dozens of times over the last century since her death. The most internationally successful was Ernst Marischka’s 1950s trilogy of romantic films starring a teenage Romy Schneider. With a figure as frequently

To All Our Cherished Critics, Contributors, Readers and Subscribers: Merry Christmas! I hope 2022 has been a bit healthier and happier for you. And I hope that we here at RogerEbert.com have contributed to some of your joy by sharing our film reviews, TV/streaming reviews, collections, interviews, blog entries and more. All of our contributors and their individual collection of published work, can be found here.

Bill Nighy is a fun, uninhibited actor, but there’s an abashed, melancholy quality to him that hasn’t been fully explored until “Living,” a drama about a senior citizen reckoning with his life.  Nighy became an unlikely star playing a dissolute, clownish old rocker in “Love, Actually,” and he’s been aces in a series of character parts and

One thing a movie watcher might not be looking for during the actual bleak midwinter is more bleak midwinter on the screen. Full disclosure: “The Pale Blue Eye,” written and directed by Scott Cooper and starring his frequent collaborator Christian Bale, set in New York’s more-rugged-than-today Hudson Valley in 1830, is thoroughly suffused with bleak

True to its title, Emer Reynolds’ “Joyride” holds both the thrills of getting away with something and the emotional crash that follows a burst of adrenaline—a mood killjoy, if you will. Fortunately, it’s in this sweet-hearted movie’s favor that the highs are stronger and more enjoyable than the lows. It may not come together as

Hirokazu Kore-eda uses arguably melodramatic plot structures to craft nuanced, delicate character studies. His focus throughout most of his career, but especially lately, has been on stories of unexpected families, and what that word even means. Is family the group into which you’re born or the one who cares for you, raises you, protects you?

Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Vicky Krieps) is getting dressed. Because she is a 19th-century empress, that means being dressed by attendants, but the one she wants is not there. With their hair in tight buns and white aprons tied with big bows, the maids pull Elisabeth’s corset strings as tightly as they can, writing down the

About 25 minutes into “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” an inarticulate, slapdash musical biopic about the famed songstress, the film reaches its high point: Arista Records head Clive Davis (Stanley Tucci) enters the nightclub where Houston (Naomi Ackie) and her gospel legend mother Cicely Houston (Tamara Tunie) are performing. When the latter sees

“Astonish me!” was the directive that the great dance impresario Serge Diaghilev gave to those who hoped to work with him. It is also what we demand of our best filmmakers. The Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who’s now, to the best of our knowledge, in a prison serving a six-year sentence on charges that don’t