Roger Ebert Reviews

Gene Wilder couldn’t have chosen a better stage name. “Gene” is so ordinary, so sane. It promises gentleness: genial, congeniality. But Wilder? That’s the sort of actor who could play Leo Bloom, Willy Wonka, Dr. Frankenstein’s nephew, or The Waco Kid.  Sure enough, from his breakout role as Bloom, the accountant who gets pulled into […]

At the beginning of “Club Zero,” the disquieting new film from director and co-writer Jessica Hausner, a trigger warning appears on screen: “This film contains scenes of behaviour control and related eating disorders which may be distressing for some viewers.” You can’t say you weren’t warned. Over the next two hours, Hausner immerses us in

Whatever you expect from an Alex Garland movie, he always gives you something else.”Civil War” is something else again. It premiered in the US hours before I published this and it’s already divisive. I look forward to reading all of the arguments for and against, even though both early raves and pans seem to be operating under the reductive assumption that

If actors often make for compelling directors, then why not character actors? Larry Fessenden (“Depraved”) is a great That Guy character actor, and his work stands out in a range of genre movies, mostly horror. Fessenden’s also the producer and sometimes writer/director behind Glass Eye Pix’s rich catalog of American indie horror movies. Fessenden’s “Blackout,”

Dev Patel pours his entire self into “Monkey Man.” Some comes over the sides and the mix might not always be right but there’s an undeniable passion here that comes through in a genre that too often feels like it came off an assembly line. The writer, producer, star, director, and guy who broke a

There are a lot of missing and dead women on TV. It’s not just zombie shows or procedurals, the prestige series has long been in on the game with feminine corpses powering entire series. In Peacock’s missing-woman mystery, “Apples Never Fall,” the beloved and powerful Annette Bening even potentially dons the trope. As Joy Delaney,

In the moment that it’s happening, it can be difficult to recognize that an actor is changing course. You’ve come to know this star in one guise—considered him to be one of the best to ever do it—and then he takes on a role that feels out of character. At the time, the role seems

The work of journalist Susan Orlean has been adapted to the big screen a few times, most notably in 2002 by Charlie Kaufman for the Oscar-nominated rumination on the nature of writing itself, “Adaptation.” But even the girl power surfing film “Blue Crush,” also from 2002, had a unique rough and tumble charm to it. I

With the notable exception of “Barbie,” the modern blockbuster can be pretty serious stuff. Whether it’s the dense lore and world-building of “Dune” or “Avatar: The Way of Water,” or the self-serious connected universe of the MCU, blockbusters have often felt like work lately too. This is not to say that some of these films aren’t

“Immaculate” feels like both a throwback to another era of Italian horror and a timely commentary on woman’s bodily autonomy, but it can’t match the flair of the former and lacks the thematic thrust to convey anything resonant about the latter. Star Sydney Sweeney continues her “moment” after the success of “Anyone but You” and