Roger Ebert Reviews

The Civil Rights movement is an era of history accustomed to filmic representation. The 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery is one of the most commonly noted moments in the movement, and the majority of the mileage of that march took place in Lowndes County, Alabama. Geeta Gandbhir (“I Am Evidence“) and Sam Pollard’s (“MLK/FBI“) […]

The phrase “Never Forget” has long been associated with the Holocaust. It’s a pushback against the type of willed, collective amnesia that allows not just the perpetrators of atrocities but their descendants to go through life unburdened by guilt for war crimes and the privileges accrued as a result of their commission. The documentary “Tantura” shows how selectively

For a country that dubs itself “the land of the free,” America has succeeded for centuries in erasing the histories of its disfranchised citizens from the history books. Transgender identity never entered my own awareness until trans activist Jazz Jennings and her family began sharing their story on the excellent TLC program, “I Am Jazz.”

Two white photographers/abolitionists arrange Peter’s posture as he sits in a chair. They ask him to turn his scourged back toward the lens, to move his face to the side. The lens pushes in on him, and a totem for the ravages of virulent racism engraved across his body comes into view. Peter asks, “Why

In a culture—both film-going and in general—that increasingly rejects intellectualism, there’s something refreshing about a movie where a key plot point revolves around a character’s ability to accurately appraise a piece of ancient Greek sculpture. “A Wounded Fawn” is a film that celebrates art and art history, one that reaches back across the millennia for

“Squid Game” Emmy winner Lee Jung-jae stars and directs this week’s explosive blockbuster “Hunt,” a film about double and triple crosses in a spy game between North and South Korea in the 1980s. About halfway through Lee’s film, I realized I had completely lost the thread of who was a good guy and who was

There’s simultaneously too much and not enough Wes Anderson in the Indian-American comedy “Four Samosas,” a warm-but-flat heist pic set in the L.A. neighborhood of Artesia (AKA “Little India.”) The makers of “Four Samosas” declare their Anderson love during the movie’s frantic opening scene, where a quartet of obviously disguised thieves burst out of Juneja’s

“Scrooge: A Christmas Carol” is as if someone made a bet that one of the most enduringly beloved works of literature—adapted with great success innumerable times featuring everyone from Mickey Mouse to the Muppets to Mister Magoo to classically trained British actors to Jim Carrey, to Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell just a couple of weeks

The filmmaker Robert Downey deserved more than a traditional bio-doc. He made films outside the system, often feeling like they were coming into form as you watched them. There’s such spontaneity to his work that a standard talking-head approach to his art would almost feel like an insult. Thankfully, his son Robert Downey Jr. and

Richard Davis’ story is a particularly American one, as director Ramin Bahrani notes in his feature documentary debut, “2nd Chance.” It’s full of self-aggrandizement and reinvention, good and bad guys, sincerity, and hypocrisy. The contradictions within the man who invented the modern bulletproof vest are stark; within his down-home demeanor, there are myriad examples of his