Roger Ebert Reviews

The Chicago International Film Festival, the longest-running competitive film festival in North America, is once again returning to give local moviegoers their first look at what’s happening right now in the world of global cinema. Running October 12-23, the festival will be screening 96 feature films from around the world, including 2 world premieres, 14 […]

In a career in the performing arts that spanned 80 years, Angela Lansbury kept herself fresh and ready to razzle-dazzle through all manner of career challenges and disappointments. There was a deep well of emotion in her that she could always draw from, and it only seemed to get deeper and become more mysterious as

Matt writes: While awaiting my early morning flight to the BendFilm Festival, all I could think about was every precious moment I shared with my dear friend and colleague, Sergio Mims. The news had just been posted of his passing last week at age 67. Sergio was the co-founder of the Black Harvest Film Festival, a contributor

I’ve long joked that Apple TV+ is a streaming service solely marketed to TV critics: With its enormous budgets, ambitious briefs, and A-list casts, the streamer has a stunningly high batting average and (with a few exceptions, like “Ted Lasso” or “Severance”) hardly ever break through into the pop culture mainstream. Each of its properties

It was a decade ago that I interviewed filmmaker Todd Looby about his splendid directorial efforts, “Lefty” and “Be Good,” naturalistic marvels that would fit perfectly among the selections at the BendFilm Festival, for which he now serves as Executive Director. Now in its nineteenth year, the festival welcomes filmmakers and cinephiles alike to visit

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