Roger Ebert Reviews

In the 20 years since it was first released, Park Chan-wook’s “Oldboy” has lost none of its ability to provoke and enthrall, none of its potency as a work of art that deploys graphic violence and equally visceral style to probe the depths of human nature.   The masterpiece that propelled South Korean cinema onto a […]

Sidney Lumet’s “The Verdict” is the best courtroom drama ever. It is also one of those rare features that doesn’t wear down with repeated viewings. That would seem odd for an entry that’s best remembered for the shock of its resolution, which should only be able to surprise the audience the first time around. And

“Hugo” came along in a wave of films in which major artists were experimenting with 3D technology. In the wake of James Cameron’s “Avatar,” artists like Wim Wenders (“Pina”), Ang Lee (“Life of Pi”), and Steven Spielberg (“The Adventures of Tintin”) experimented with the form, but arguably the best movie to emerge from this trend was

With his new film “Passages,” writer/director Ira Sachs forges a scorchingly sensual, exhilaratingly free, and brutally honest vision of romantic desire in all its raw, violent collisions.  Tracing the combustible relationships between filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski), his longtime partner Martin (Ben Whishaw), and schoolteacher Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), with whom Tomas begins an affair after wrapping

“Telemarketers” deserves your time for being that rare bird of documentaries: a filmmaker’s personal story captured over many years (in this case, 22), fueled by the need to get a bizarre experience on camera. The footage can be molded into a narrative later. Years before he was a documentarian, Sam Lipman-Stern recorded his time working for

In “Between Two Worlds,” Marianne (Juliette Binoche) is first seen waiting in a line at a crowded job referral office, people jostling around her, frustrated by the wall of bureaucracy, desperate for work. She gets a job with a cleaning company, goes through rigorous training, and then suffers through a series of gigs, scrubbing toilets

Director Matthew López makes an impressive feature debut with “Red, White & Royal Blue,” a love story that skillfully blends the familiar beats of a classic movie romance with the distinctive details of two of the world’s most public young men trying to keep their relationship private. Adapted from Casey McQuiston’s best-selling book, the film is about a

My grandfather served valiantly in World War II, landing on the beaches of Normandy, coming home, and never speaking of it again for decades. Near the end of his life, he started to share some stories, often unexpectedly at family gatherings, things he had never told anyone, but one suspects he had thought about for

Inspired by Akiko Yano’s 1991 ballad of the same name, writer/director Kōji Fukada’s gentle drama “Love Life” tackles those two very broad subjects (love & life) through the intimate introspection of characters caught up in a complex web of interconnected relationships. Fukada’s melodrama explores how these connections form and fracture—how they’re affected by grief and how distance

As those of you with a decent grasp of horror trivia already know, the Demeter was the ship whose ultimately doomed journey to deliver some especially dangerous cargo from Carpathia to London was chronicled in the seventh chapter of the Bram Stoker classic Dracula. Although this section, running 16 pages in my copy, contains some