Roger Ebert Reviews

With my final dispatch for the Toronto International Film Festival, I want to return to a question I asked in my first dispatch: Are movies back? And once again, the answer lies in whether they’re good or not. The three films assembled, here, isn’t the rush of quality you’d hope from a festival of TIFF’s […]

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ new exhibition, “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898 -1971,” opened on August 21st and runs through April 9th, 2023. Regeneration comprises seven galleries dedicated to: exploring the social and political situation of Black Americans at the dawn of cinema in the United States; the representation of Black people in early cinema from 1897

“Riotsville, U.S.A.,” the title of director Sierra Pettengill bleak and intense documentary, sounds like a provocation on the filmmaker’s part. Then you realize it refers to the actual name of a fictional place the U.S. military created in the 1960’s. On two bases, both named for racists, a series of staged activities were performed against

It has been over three decades since Gregory McDonald’s Fletch headlined a feature film (in the pretty awful “Fletch Lives,” the only Chevy Chase-led sequel to the beloved “Fletch”). It’s not for lack of trying. Kevin Smith notoriously came this close to getting a “Fletch” reboot off the ground with his BFF Jason Lee in

June and Jennifer Gibbons were Welsh twins born to Caribbean immigrants in the 1960s. Severely bullied and ostracized as the only Black family in the neighborhood, the two receded into each other to an extreme level. Referred to as “The Silent Twins”—the same name as Agnieszka Smoczynska’s biographical drama inspired by their story—they spoke only to

Produced in 2014, “Goodnight Mommy,” an Austrian import from co-filmmakers Veronica Franz and Severin Fiala, was a diabolical and queasily effective item that took one of the most primal of fears—that the people that we know and love have somehow been replaced—and filtered it through an examination of the societal belief in an unbreakable bond

Having already established himself as a fresh voice in the world of documentary filmmaking with his 2002 documentary “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” Brett Morgen truly came to prominence with “Cobain: Montage of Heck,” (2015). The film utilized archive footage and home videos to intimately display Kurt Cobain’s life, leading up to his death.

I don’t think you’ll find a more somber collection of films than in my second dispatch from the Toronto International Film Festival. Each work includes direct links to death and the ways that fact of life can rock our foundation; they also also center forlorn women dealing with their grief with, at times, self-destructive means. And

Western Montana is a wild place, full of beauty and desolation, though “God’s Country” dwells more upon the latter. In its forlorn depiction of this vast, mountainous sweep, the ground is frozen and hard, and the people who live there are much the same.  Early in Julian Higgins’ profound and haunting feature debut, out Friday,

Your enjoyment of “See How They Run” will depend on your appreciation for its two most prominent elements. The first is the genre of the classic British murder mystery and the names associated with those who created them and those who parodied and meta-commented on them. And the second is the genre of meta-commentary itself.