Roger Ebert Reviews

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.

The vengeance-driven friendship comedy “Do Revenge” is to the 1980s and ’90s high school movie as the “Scream” series was to the post-“Halloween” slasher picture. It’s a compendium of devices, references, and (sometimes tediously) self-deprecating jokes that seems meant to let you know that the filmmakers know that you know what they’re up to. At the same time, the

The overwhelming amount of films to see in Toronto means that it’s impossible to have a perfect fest. Personally, I wish I had made more room for documentaries this year, as my nearly-40-movie schedule only finalized with three non-fiction flicks. While none of the three matched the brilliance of the Sundance docs I saw this

Women are tough as hell in the face of oppression and rebellious at heart. This is the core concept of three films playing this year’s festival. Elena López Riera’s quasi-anthropological drama “El agua” explores the power of self-actualization in the face of oppressively patriarchal traditions and myths. Stephanie Johnes’s surf doc “Maya and The Wave”

After the first weekend of TIFF, which highlights world premiere events, the fest opens up a bit and allows major productions that premiered in the just-wrapped Venice or Telluride festivals to join the party. Here’s where the conversations get very awards driven as the films that studios hope will turn FYC ads into trophies use

High-concept, single-setting pieces were a trend at TIFF this year, and likely for some time to come. It’s almost like the pandemic turned movies into plays (“The Whale” qualifies here too), and it was interesting to see which filmmakers could still find a way to make the limited scope of their stories feel cinematic. There’s

What does it mean when we say “movies are back”? I’ve seen the oft-used phrase, sometimes in jest, thrown around on Twitter. I’ve also heard it uttered in winding queues and within the bustling afterparties at the Toronto International Film Festival. Having visited the slimmed down iteration of the festival last year—where the streets were