Roger Ebert Reviews

Would you like to know the day you will die? It’s a tricky thought exercise. What if you find out you’ll die at a ripe old age? That sure would make retirement investing and travel plans easier. But what if the news was grim? That you’ll die within the year – before you’ve had the […]

The final words of his 1953 novel “The Unnamable” — “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” — are among the most famous written by Irish poet, playwright, essayist, and novelist Samuel Beckett. They epitomize both the hopelessness and the senseless resilience of what we’ll call the human spirit in an utterly plain and compelling way.

There’s a scene in “Not Not Jazz,” a film about the fusion jazz trio Medeski Martin & Wood, where the camera prowls slowly around bassist Chris Wood as he slowly saws his upright bass on an upstate New York tennis court dotted with fallen leaves. There are a lot of scenes like that in “Not Not

In the wake of Quentin Tarantino’s ascendance to his pop culture throne in the ‘90s, dozens of imitators tried to mimic his approach to filmmaking, only to fall flat on their faces. It turns out that what he does is much harder than it looks. As all of those Tarantino wannabes were to “Pulp Fiction,” Neil

The tricky part with a docuseries like “Hollywood Black,” particularly if you have a deep reservoir of knowledge about its chosen subject, is realizing that it’ll probably never be as comprehensive as you’d like. After all, the four-part series directed by Justin Simien (“Dear White People”), adapted from the same-titled book by film historian Donald

It’s hard to imagine that this summer will see a better crowd-pleaser than “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In,” a nostalgic Hong Kong action spectacular featuring the year’s most thrilling action filmmaking. Unbound by physics or any sense of psychological realism, “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In” is also probably the best comic book adaptation

The crimes of the Catholic Church are no secret to most citizens of the Western world. Yet, as is the case with many historical recollections, the deliverance of information is often filtered through a lens of whiteness, and victims of color fall to the footnotes. For many non-Indigenous people, the lack of awareness about the

“Cuckoo” gets more confusing the more it explains itself. The further writer-director Tilman Singer goes in articulating the strange goings-on that drive this stylish, unsettling thriller, the less compelling it becomes.    Trying to comprehend the hows and whys of this twisted mystery creates a distraction from which the film never recovers. Either we needed

In 2013, Angela Patton gave a TEDXWomen Talk that went viral. She spoke about a program she created in Richmond, Virginia, to bring girls and their incarcerated fathers together in an environment that would make the fathers and daughters feel cherished and connected. These “Daddy Daughter Dances” have been so impactful the program has expanded

Fittingly, director Tilman Singer’s “Cuckoo” feels very much like a bird’s nest in form and theme, namely in how it finds ways to coalesce multiple disparate strands into a cohesive whole.  The film sees seventeen-year-old Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) arriving in the German Alps with her father, Luis (Marton Csókás), stepmother, Beth (Jessica Henwick), and her seven-year-old