Roger Ebert Reviews

The Belgian filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are low-key the most influential filmmakers working today, I reckon. While their impact on mainstream Hollywood product is nil, you can feel them in independent cinema worldwide. Every time a movie opens with an over-the-shoulder shot of what will turn out to be its main character walking […]

“It’s built on my sadness. It’s built on my struggle,” says director Nina Menkes as she shares the impetus behind her latest film, “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power.” This personal connection to the material is evident in every frame of the documentary. Unfortunately, it also covers the film in a thick layer of confirmation bias. That there is

The ruminative and moving “All That Breathes” opens with a shot of a dark landscape as a camera moves over the littered ground in the city of New Delhi. As other animals lurk in the background, the garbage in the street is food to the rats that scurry in an unfocused frame, the noise they

At last year’s Middleburg Film Festival, the pandemic required attendees to bring a negative Covid-19 test before being able to sit at the venues, where they were also required to don masks. This year, some film fans of a certain age still felt the need to safeguard their health with masks, which was probably wise. Even

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, and featuring a remarkable lead performance by Dwayne Johnson, the spiky and majestic “Black Adam” is one of the best DC superhero films to date. This tale of a gloomy, seemingly malevolent god who reappears in a long-occupied Middle Eastern nation rejects most of the choices that bland-ify even the good

In the foreground, an 11-year-old girl lies asleep in bed. On the balcony beyond, seen through the plate-glass door, the girl’s father struggles to light a cigarette, hampered by the cast on his right arm. Mission accomplished, he sways back and forth rhythmically, arms moving outwards and upwards and down, a dreamy approximation of Tai

“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