Roger Ebert Reviews

Alex Garland’s worlds, even those in the more fantastical realms of “Ex Machina,” “Dredd,” and “Annihilation,” find as many ways as possible to sell their fantasies within a realm of muted, grounded realism. And so it goes that his latest project, “Warfare,” takes that zeal for verisimilitude to its grandest degree yet: Recreating a real […]

Medical dramas were a TV staple in previous decades, but it feels like they’ve taken a backseat in a procedural world overrun with firefighters and police officers. However, in the last year, the tables have turned, with NBC’s “St. Denis Medical” and HBO’s “The Pitt” becoming more popular each week they air. Hospital-set dramas can

When he died on Tuesday at age 65 of pneumonia, everyone had their image of Val Kilmer at hand to personally mourn. There was the wonderfully showy Juilliard valedictorian, the youngest actor ever accepted into the prestigious school, the young Brando who made his method bona fides known with theatrical, physical turns in “Tombstone,” “The

What do you do when you’ve finally achieved everything you wanted? How do you hold onto it? And how do you keep creatively active when everything about you has been trying to figure out what’s next? These questions are at the core of the excellent fourth season of Max’s Emmy-winning “Hacks,” still the best comedy

When Microsoft acquired developer Compulsion Games in 2018, all eyes were on the studio to see what it could deliver at the release of its last game, “We Happy Few.” Compulsion Games had something special and intriguing with the game’s narrative premise, set in a dystopia where everyone took drugs to stay happy. However, the

Michael Shannon’s feature directorial debut, “Eric LaRue,” is of a piece with the anguished psychological dramas for which he’s acclaimed as an actor. But its painful subject matter also reflects the burning social conscience he says he’s long been driven to interrogate through art.  An adaptation of Brett Neveu’s 2002 play of the same name,

ROGER EBERT: JUNE 18, 1942 – APRIL 4, 2013 Roger famously said that movies are a machine that generates empathy. What he found fascinating about the images unfolding on the screen is that they allowed us to stand in the shoes and circumstances of a person or group unlike ourselves for two hours at a

In Stephen Cognetti’s “Hell House” films, a character carrying the camera, and us within it, walks for what feels like an insufferably elastic length of time through a labyrinthine house or down a hallway, to ultimately come upon a life-sized mannequin dressed as a clown.  It’s disquieting coming upon this clown, and we, alongside the

Anyone who has played the games on which HBO’s “The Last of Us” is based knows that things are about to get intense. Without spoiling a single thing, the video game “The Last of Us, Part II” turns up the volume on the first game’s themes of individual responsibility set against the greater good with

I find it challenging to review “found footage” documentaries where the primary focus is on the footage itself. You watch it. It makes sense that someone would release the footage into the world. You make sense of it in the context of our world today. And you think, “Wow. Nothing’s changed in our world,” or