Roger Ebert Reviews

I wrote in my review of the 2018 reboot of “Halloween” that the team behind the film didn’t “really understand what made the first film a masterpiece.” Not to be that guy, but if the cluttered “Halloween Kills” didn’t prove me right then the baffling “Halloween Ends” certainly does. What’s so bizarre about this truly […]

To officially kick off this year’s edition, its 58th, the Chicago International Film Festival elected to go in a markedly different direction and it proved to be all the better for it. Instead of the semi-formal and star-studded red carpet events of the past, the pre-film festivities took the form of a community block party held

Mining the ’80s for its analog ambiance has been a “thing” since the moment the ’80s ended and, at times, it can be very effective. But it’s hard to figure out what exactly the 1987 setting provides the zombie-comedy “The Loneliest Boy in the World,” where a socially awkward kid creates a makeshift family from

Whenever art becomes classic, it’s bound to spawn reinventions. Karen Maine’s “Rosaline,” a quippy and sarcastic remix of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, is the latest addition. Based on the book When You Were Mine by Rebecca Serle, it pulls back the curtain on Romeo’s titular former lover and consequential cousin of the fated Juliet. The

The pandemic has been a time of missed connections. That’s “missed” in both senses of the word, as in “the receiver missed the football” and as in the longing we feel for the people and places and times of our live that are most dear to us.  As the all-too-familiar Zoom call opening of “The

As usual, the New York Film Festival showcased a slew of documentaries this year. Their topics ranged from in-depth looks at celebrities to probing examinations of prescription drug fraud and slavery. The festival’s centerpiece was the Venice award-winning Laura Poitras documentary, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” a film that consisted of two powerful narratives

Park Chan-wook doesn’t make films that feel as traditional as the first hour of “Decision to Leave.” Anyone who knows that this is a movie from the director of “Oldboy” and “The Handmaiden” will be looking closely at the relatively straightforward thriller in front of them and trying to figure how it’s going to turn

This film, directed by Edward Berger from a script he wrote with Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell, is the first German-made version of Erich Maria Remarque’s famed novel about World War I, written in German and published in 1928. The first film adaptation of the book, released in 1930, was American, directed by Lewis Milestone,

“The Curse of Bridge Hollow” is essentially an Adam Sandler movie without Adam Sandler—and not one of the good Adam Sandler movies, like “Uncut Gems” or “Hustle,” where he tantalizes us with the fact that he can actually act. No, this feels more like one of the many broad, lifeless comedies he’s made for Netflix

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer,” British-born D.H. Lawrence asserted in his seminal 1924 book Studies in Classic American Literature, in which he considered writers ranging from Franklin to Poe to Melville and others. Lawrence had a point, to be sure, but his remark seemed to have opened a Pandora’s box