Roger Ebert Reviews

There’s simultaneously too much and not enough Wes Anderson in the Indian-American comedy “Four Samosas,” a warm-but-flat heist pic set in the L.A. neighborhood of Artesia (AKA “Little India.”) The makers of “Four Samosas” declare their Anderson love during the movie’s frantic opening scene, where a quartet of obviously disguised thieves burst out of Juneja’s […]

“Scrooge: A Christmas Carol” is as if someone made a bet that one of the most enduringly beloved works of literature—adapted with great success innumerable times featuring everyone from Mickey Mouse to the Muppets to Mister Magoo to classically trained British actors to Jim Carrey, to Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell just a couple of weeks

The filmmaker Robert Downey deserved more than a traditional bio-doc. He made films outside the system, often feeling like they were coming into form as you watched them. There’s such spontaneity to his work that a standard talking-head approach to his art would almost feel like an insult. Thankfully, his son Robert Downey Jr. and

Richard Davis’ story is a particularly American one, as director Ramin Bahrani notes in his feature documentary debut, “2nd Chance.” It’s full of self-aggrandizement and reinvention, good and bad guys, sincerity, and hypocrisy. The contradictions within the man who invented the modern bulletproof vest are stark; within his down-home demeanor, there are myriad examples of his

One of the funniest jokes in “Scrooged,” the sometimes uneven but vastly underrated 1988 Bill Murray riff on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, came right at the beginning with an artificial promotional trailer. Titled “The Night the Reindeer Died,” it was a cheerfully cheesy bit of holiday carnage in which terrorists attempt to seize the North Pole

There’s something comforting about a traditional mystery series, one that puts most of the charisma and intelligence into a crime-solving protagonist and unleashes them on different homicidal riddles. The latest in the genre is a pleasant little surprise at the end of 2022, a very solid procedural that hands the inspector’s notebook to the great

Death unites us all. And societies are shaped by not just the dread of that inevitable outcome but the common manners in which we push those existential thoughts aside. Consumerism, conspiracy theories, and collective trauma collide in Noah Baumbach’s daring adaptation of a novel that may have been published in the mid-’80s but undeniably speaks

Joanna Hogg’s films are personal, even uber-personal, so much so that she used her own furniture for Julie’s apartment in “The Souvenir” and “The Souvenir Part II,” transporting objects into the “set” to immerse herself and her cast in the past she was trying to capture. Objects are never just objects in Hogg’s hands, but

“George & Tammy” is about two lovers who probably shouldn’t have been together, never mind over many years. But their union led to numerous hits—duets and solo songs—about the historical relationship between George Jones and Tammy Wynette. He was the hard-drinkin’ king, and she was his supportive queen, with an empire built of all the

The Unloved is nine years old today. My creation is old enough to do basic math and bother people with limited knowledge of the world.  I remember bugging everyone I knew when I was that age with hastily written lists of my favorite films of all time (having seen a very impressive 300 or so of them