Roger Ebert Reviews

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 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

“Being Black is valuable.”  Of the amalgam of Black-led film and television projects of the last 10 years, Donald Glover’s “Atlanta” has cemented itself as one of the most singular, iconic contributions to the culture. Continually keeping its finger on the pulse of Black identity and the state of America, no other show has delivered

He was one of the great cataloguers, so let’s catalogue his career: Jean-Luc Godard was a combative film critic in the 1950s, and he made five shorts in his mid-twenties. At nearly 30 he broke ground with “Breathless” (1959), beginning a run of 15 rules-defying features and six shorts that established him as a major

Kevin Smith movies can sometimes read as un-reviewable. Take in point “Clerks III,” which more often has the feel of a behind-the-scenes feature, a home movie, or a commemorative issue than a film that should be taken on its own and judged for creativity and intent. It’s good with its minimal creative aspirations, and it