Roger Ebert Reviews

Josh and Rebecca Tickell’s documentary “Common Ground” explores regenerative agriculture as a proposed fix for what they call a “broken planetary system,” but is most of all like an unfortunate “SNL” parody of celebrity activism. “Common Ground” focuses too much solely on American agriculture and then uses big names like Laura Dern, Woody Harrelson, Rosario Dawson, and Jason Momoa to […]

Did you know that social media fosters toxic relationships among its users, who only gain clout and/or material gains by performing inanely for each other? In this fundamentally unbalanced type of community network, individuals are complicit for as long as they allow themselves to be seduced by the illusion of power—wow! That’s the sort of

John Trengrove’s “Manodrome” is an incel-era update of “Fight Club,” a story of an average guy whose inner demons are unleashed when he meets a group of men trying to reclaim their perceived place in the world. “Manodrome” weaves modern themes like the emergence of toxic incels across the internet into a tale of a loner

“This Much We Know” focuses largely on 16-year-old Levi Presley, who died by suicide in 2002 after jumping from the top of the Stratosphere Tower in Las Vegas, a city with a startling suicide rate. The same week he did so, the United States government designated Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as a site of nuclear storage. Through

Documentarian Wang Bing can count the three-hour-plus “Youth (Spring)” as among his more terse pictures. After all, his 2017 picture “15 Hours” clocked in at 15 hours and, like Andy Warhol’s eight-hour “Empire,” consisted of a single shot. The passage of time, of course, means different things depending on what you’re looking at. “Empire” is

The description of Roger Ross Williams’ “Stamped from the Beginning” might make it sound like a stuffy history lesson. After all, how on Earth could a film chronicle the history of racism and the ripple effect of slavery in a single run time in a way that won’t just be information overload? To avoid this “filmed

Hospitals were nothing like the messy, chaotic places I grew up watching on TV or in movies. Back in my scrub days volunteering in an intensive care unit, everything was more or less quiet until something—a patient moving in or moving on to the next life—incited a medical team into action. But even in that

“Your Lucky Day” is quick and nasty, leaving barely a moment for breathing room, philosophy, or even a statement of themes and motivation. You don’t need the statement. Writer/director Daniel Brown attempts to actually do something besides telling a story about a hostage situation in a Sip ‘n Go. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment, but

Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie want you to simmer in the uncomfortable awkwardness of “The Curse,” their 10-episode new series for Showtime about a couple whose lives dissolve while they make a generally awful home-flipping show. So, the fact that it starts to drag after an incredible first few episodes feels by design. No one

If you put Nancy Drew in a teen slasher take of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” you’d get the bloody yet spirited “It’s a Wonderful Knife.” More than an assemblage of its familiar parts, director Tyler MacIntyre’s film intensely opens with Henry Waters (Justin Long), the self-absorbed real estate agent of the quaint small town Angel