May 14, 2025 9:05 am

Roger Ebert Reviews

Sharp, Propulsive “The Agency” Should Appeal to Fans of Spy Fiction

Paramount+ and Showtime’s “The Agency” doesn’t have the spy action that fans of “Mission: Impossible” or James Bond may expect, but I found the two episodes sent to press consistently riveting due to the sharp dialogue, incredible ensemble, and tight filmmaking. In an era of broad escapism like “The Night Agent” (which has value too, […]

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A Sense of Freedom: Filmmaker and Teacher Bart Weiss Talks About his Book “Smartphone Cinema”

Bart Weiss is a longtime North Texas filmmaker, film programmer, teacher (at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he just recently retired), and all around source of wisdom about everything related to cinema. He just published his first book, titled Smartphone Cinema: Making Great Films with Your Mobile Phone. I got to know Bart

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Black Harvest Film Festival 2024: Disco Afrika, It Was All a Dream, Dreams Like Paper Boats

I’ve never felt prouder to be a Chicagoan than when attending the 30th Black Harvest Film Festival. As Chicago’s premier Black film festival, Black Harvest serves as a homecoming for the voices and stories of Black people from the city and across the diaspora and the world. This year, I felt a profound connection to

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Appreciating the Brushstrokes: Pre-Computer Animation and the Human Touch

One era’s trash is another era’s treasure. This becomes truer the deeper we get into the era of computers and automated, technology-assisted production. I’ve been thinking about this because of the existence of the nostalgia cable network MeTV Toons. It runs nothing but older animation—mainly stuff produced between the 1940s and the 1990s for movie

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Love Is Political: Payal Kapadia on “All We Imagine as Light”

Across the two features she’s made to date, Payal Kapadia has emerged as a luminous new voice in Indian cinema, exploring the personal as political through her shimmering, empathetic portraits of working-class Mumbai.  Her first feature, “A Night of Knowing Nothing,” opened with unsent love letters, from a film student to her estranged lover, discovered

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“Call of Duty: Black Ops 6” is Best Installment in the Franchise in Years

It’s been a long time since a “Call of Duty” game truly entertained me. Sure, I still play them every year, going on two decades now, but it’s felt like the developers were treading water, at best, during the last few installments. 2023’s “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III” was particularly egregious with its greatest

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