Roger Ebert Reviews

“V/H/S/99,” which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival before a Shudder drop next month, is a vicious, angry movie. Perhaps it’s merely coincidental, but it feels intentional in the manner in which these found footage short films all seem to feature people, well, “f**king around and finding out.” Some have suggested that the film […]

In the field of stop-motion animation, no filmmaker has had a never-ending streak of hits like Henry Selick. Since his directorial debut with “Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas”—which soon hits its 30th anniversary in the coming year—Selick’s skillful hand-crafting of spooky worlds that range between the supernatural and whimsical has enchanted movie lovers for decades.

Prime Video’s “The Peripheral” seems to have everything, except the intrigue to keep you watching. Its story plays with time travel, simulations and avatars, faceless robots, secret missions, and something about the apocalypse. But there’s also American veterans protecting their own in backwoods shootouts, a 21st century version of Boss Hogg, and invisible cars. There’s

It sounds clichéd, but there really is nothing else on TV like “Documentary Now!” The IFC Channel program produced by Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, Seth Meyers, Alex Buono, and others, is one of the smartest comedies of the last decade, a show that knows it’s going to play best for a relatively limited fan base

“Harry Potter” meets “Descendants” with a dash of “Romeo and Juliet” in “The School for Good and Evil.” And yes, it is as overstuffed as that sounds. This massive, magical adventure is also way too long at 2 ½ hours, but rarely in that running time do we see any glimmers of the kind of

Ever since I took my family to see writer/director Rodrigo García’s “Nine Lives” at Chicago’s Landmark Century Centre Cinema per Roger Ebert’s recommendation in 2005, the picture has always had a coveted spot on my top ten list of all-time favorite films. When Alfred Hitchcock attempted to craft a film that would be nearly devoid of

A few months ago at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, I sat in silence, fully dazed, as the credits rolled on a film that seemingly kicked me in the throat and also gave me a warm hug. The best movies, in that way, have a tendency to perform the incomprehensible; they’re familiar yet distant in the

The City & State sidebar in the Chicago International Film Festival lineup is a section of movies dedicated to works produced by locally based filmmakers, dealing with stories set in and around the area. This year’s lineup of titles is anchored by a trio of informative documentaries that serve as often eye-opening explorations of the

It’s always a thorough disappointment when you’ve sat through a lovely movie in a mostly empty theatre and then you watch it fill up with people for the big-ticket item that follows. That happened at this year’s New York Film Festival when Davy Chou’s asymmetrical “Return to Seoul” received a poor showing minutes before a

Although “Stars at Noon” is set in Nicaragua during the very recent past, it’s another film by legendary director Claire Denis (“Beau Travail,” “Chocolat”) that seems to have been time-warped in from the 1970s or ’80s, when tough, smart, languorous, handsomely produced, frankly sexual portraits of fascinating but often unlikable adults got made and seen more than occasionally—and played in art house theaters