Roger Ebert Reviews

It’s a Saturday night in January 1997 at the Mundelein Theater and we’re all saying goodbye.  Our movie theater where we had been performing “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” for the past several years would soon close. I had been performing with them since early ‘95 and I had been through this type of farewell party […]

It makes sense that the NYFF selection committee relegated “Coma” to Currents, despite Bertrand Bonello being a main slate kind of an act for the most part. On the one hand, it’s a movie that mostly takes place in its heroine’s (Louise Labeque, back from “Zombi Child”) bedroom, as she imagines dramatic scenes in her

The best thing I saw at this year’s New York Film Festival was Ben Russell’s “Against Time,” part of the short film offering “Currents Program 8: Time Out of Mind,” playing again on October 10th. Russell increasingly presents as a man without a nation, rather he seems to find purchase thematically wherever his camera finds

“The World Is Too Much with Us,” the title of a Wordsworth sonnet that has nothing to do with cinema, has been running through my head since the beginning of this year’s New York Film Festival, as if to signify the way that faraway crises in 2022 have of intruding on our ordinary pursuits, including

Leslie isn’t circling the bottom of the drain yet, but she’s sunk pretty low.  We first meet the title character of “To Leslie” (Andrea Risenborough) in an opening credits montage of photos showing what life was like before. Leslie got married, had a son, won $190,000 in a lottery and then burned through it all. The main story picks up seven

Sergio Mims, the co-founder of the Black Harvest Film Festival, a contributor to this site, and a long-standing member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, passed away this week at the age of 67. We wanted to open a platform to his colleagues and friends to help express their loss and what Sergio meant to them.

Movie posters dot the background of Ida Hansen Eldøen’s charming animated short “This Is Katharine.” More than mere easter eggs, they’re a shorthand for how the film’s characters express and understand their queerness. And they remind us why we have queer film festivals in the first place.  Like Katharine, many queer people look for themselves

Marvel and Disney+’s “Werewolf by Night” is a great project in concept, but less so in execution. On paper, it should be a home run. Existing somewhere between a TV show and a movie, this standalone 53-minute adventure/thriller is like a one-off comic book, something that should allow for more freedom of creative expression, the stuff

“Piggy” is like the feature-length version of an editing gag that (often) feels cheap. Backed into a proverbial corner, an angry character lashes out at another in some explosive bit of violence. But then: another cut reveals this moment was just a fantasy in our protagonist’s head (you can see this gotcha bit in David O.

“The Clock.” “Dogfight.” “Before Sunrise.” The rarely-discussed but charming “Night Owls.” “Lost in Translation.” Movies where two people, preferably with different life experiences and/or outlooks, meet, sometimes “meet cute,” and spend 24 life-changing hours together. There’s the whole “people come into your life for a season, a reason, or a lifetime” philosophy. The characters are