Roger Ebert Reviews

Ever since I took my family to see writer/director Rodrigo García’s “Nine Lives” at Chicago’s Landmark Century Centre Cinema per Roger Ebert’s recommendation in 2005, the picture has always had a coveted spot on my top ten list of all-time favorite films. When Alfred Hitchcock attempted to craft a film that would be nearly devoid of […]

A few months ago at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, I sat in silence, fully dazed, as the credits rolled on a film that seemingly kicked me in the throat and also gave me a warm hug. The best movies, in that way, have a tendency to perform the incomprehensible; they’re familiar yet distant in the

The City & State sidebar in the Chicago International Film Festival lineup is a section of movies dedicated to works produced by locally based filmmakers, dealing with stories set in and around the area. This year’s lineup of titles is anchored by a trio of informative documentaries that serve as often eye-opening explorations of the

It’s always a thorough disappointment when you’ve sat through a lovely movie in a mostly empty theatre and then you watch it fill up with people for the big-ticket item that follows. That happened at this year’s New York Film Festival when Davy Chou’s asymmetrical “Return to Seoul” received a poor showing minutes before a

Although “Stars at Noon” is set in Nicaragua during the very recent past, it’s another film by legendary director Claire Denis (“Beau Travail,” “Chocolat”) that seems to have been time-warped in from the 1970s or ’80s, when tough, smart, languorous, handsomely produced, frankly sexual portraits of fascinating but often unlikable adults got made and seen more than occasionally—and played in art house theaters

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