Roger Ebert Reviews

“Echo 3” is a significant example of not judging a series by its first couple of episodes, whether one loves what it’s doing or not. It initially seems like it’s cut from a familiar cloth about military men using their decorated skills to protect their deepest bonds. In the first episode, it’s about a messy […]

I spoke to Ryan White the morning after his film, “Good Night Oppy” won the top Critics Choice documentary award for the story of the intrepid Mars Rovers that won the hearts of people all over the world by outlasting their expected 90-days and continuing to explore the red planet for more than 14 years.

When you meet Anna Diop, the ebullient star of writer/director Nikyatu Jusu’s “Nanny,” you notice how closely her fearlessness as an actor aligns with the film’s potent protagonist. In Jusu’s debut feature, Diop plays the determined, hardworking Aisha. Living in New York City as an undocumented Senegalese emigrant, Aisha takes a high-paying job as a

Hollywood’s output of American immigrant plotlines is endless. Yet while many of them are no doubt empathetic films, they also contain a sense of distance. Whether it’s in a film’s decades-ago period or a focus on the external forces that other its characters, rather than their interiorities and inner thoughts, this particular subject of film

It’s 2011 in a suburb outside of the city of Damascus, Syria. Two sisters are playing in the middle of an idyllic pool scene. People of all ages splash around them or dive below the water’s aqua surface. The sun is out, there’s pop music in the background. Surrounded by mountains and the occasional sprinkling

Sounds of flesh being ravenously devoured permeate an early scene in “Bones and All.” Sparing us most of the visual horror, director Luca Guadagnino instructs the audience to look away from the grisly feeding. By pointing the camera at photographs of the victim, an elderly woman, on vacation or with her loved ones, he preserves

All the basic elements of “Strange World,” Disney’s latest sci-fi/fantasy flick, are familiar. There’s a family of adventurers, a dire mission to save the planet from a mysterious ecological crisis, an absent father, three generations of insecure men, and a bunch of under-developed female supporting characters whose placeholder personalities range from strong to loving. It’s

D.H. Lawrence’s novel does not start with plot points or scene-setting. Oh, no. In the opening paragraph, Lawrence bellows into a megaphone: “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new

The Fabelmans are a middle-class Jewish family living in various cities in the middle of the 20th century. Steven Spielberg’s film about them centers on the conflict between artistic drive and personal responsibility. And the mysteries of genius and happiness, or, more accurately, what those words mean. The matriarch, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), is a former classical pianist who

The adage that holds “the personal is the political” has been batted around for decades, and it’s certainly one worth considering in the wake of, say, the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Roe v. Wade. It’s certainly not a universally accepted sentiment; the late critic Terry Teachout objected strongly to it: “It all goes