September 20, 2024 7:43 pm

Roger Ebert Reviews

Slumberland

With its innovative design (including panels that would grow and shrink to help convey a genuine sense of proportion to readers), bold use of color, and trippy storylines, Little Nemo in Slumberland was a comic strip like no other when it debuted in the New York Herald in 1905. Those audacious elements would lead to its […]

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Love, Charlie

Rebecca Halpern’s “Love, Charlie” is an admiring history lesson about one of Chicago’s greatest chefs, Charlie Trotter. At its peak in the ’90s, his Chicago restaurant Charlie Trotter was considered to be one of the best in the world. Trotter achieved celebrity status alongside the TV chef ascendance of Chef Emeril Lagasse, and could count

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Taurus

Like all addicts, “Taurus” has its moments of clarity. Midway through writer/director Tim Sutton’s mind-numbingly indulgent character study of an uninteresting rap-rock musician, Chris Taurus (Colson Baker, a.k.a. Machine Gun Kelly) sits down for an on-camera interview. Up to this point, the character has barely been sentient enough to form a full sentence. But once

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The Inspection

Elegance Bratton’s directorial debut “The Inspection” is a boot camp movie that follows the standard arc of such films: a troubled young person enlists (or is drafted), has a rough training period in which he is targeted with cruel special attention by a drill instructor, considers quitting, but eventually decides to stick it out and make it

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Bad Axe

We are only at the very beginning of the wave of documentaries that will be released about life in the United States in the early 2020s. It will be defined by the human cost of the pandemic, but that historical event also shook loose a number of other issues, including economic disparity and racial inequality,

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She Said

On October 5, 2017, a New York Times story by reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor made public what had been whispered about for years. One of the most powerful men in Hollywood, Harvey Weinstein, who made films that made millions at the box office and got dozens of Oscar nominations and three Best Picture wins, was

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Disenchanted

In 2007’s “Enchanted,” the clash between the naiveté and eternal optimism of classic Disney-ified animated fairytales and the cynical real world of Manhattan felt fresh and invigorating. Amy Adams’ committed performance as Giselle, a Disney princess personified, catapulted her into mainstream success. But as Disney’s IP continues to saturate the market, it’s fitting that their latest direct-to-streaming

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The Menu

The obscenely wealthy are having a tough time at the movies lately. Last month, Ruben Östlund stuck a bunch of them on a luxury yacht and watched them projectile vomit all over each other in “Triangle of Sadness.” Next week, Rian Johnson will stick a bunch of them on a private Greek island to watch

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Fleishman is in Trouble

Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s “Fleishman is in Trouble” is a potent collection of crises, a mini-epic about being in one’s forties and not having everything figured out, as one might believe it all should be. That realization scares them. It makes them angry; it makes them run away. One’s marital status (happily together or blissfully apart) and

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