Roger Ebert Reviews

One of the shining jewels of Apple TV+’s lavish yet underseen output—”Ted Lasso” and “Severance” aside—”Pachinko” stood out in 2022 as one of the most layered, complex shows on the streamer. An epic, novelistic tapestry woven through generations of a Korean family’s struggle through Japanese occupation, cultural assimilation, and all manner of personal boondoggles. While […]

What happens when you take DIY auteurs and put them on a professional movie set? That was what happened when Toby Poser and John Adams traveled to Serbia to make “Hell Hole,” the latest film from half of the team known as the Adams Family.  For those who haven’t met them yet, the Adams are

The hardest part about attending a film festival strictly as a critic, is knowing you have little chance of seeing the wealth of retrospective titles programmed. It’s just so difficult to divide your time away from the newer titles, mostly because, quite frankly, those pay the bills. Often you just hope your local repertory movie

The Chinese WW2 spy thriller “Decoded” stands out for a number of reasons, mostly in spite of its conventional and hackneyed depiction of a troubled mathematician who deciphers encrypted messages for the mainland army. For starters, “Decoded” provides a dramatic change of pace for two marquee-worthy names: soft-spoken heart-throb Liu Haoran, who takes an unusual

Immigrant stories put a fresh frame around lives that native-born citizens don’t think too deeply about. Science fiction movies can do the same, but in a more exaggerated fashion, revealing the surreal eeriness of the “normal.”  You see this dynamic at work in “The Becomers,” writer-director Zach Clark’s movie about extraterrestrials coming to earth and assuming the bodies of

The Adams Family—a group of filmmakers led by father John Adams, mother Toby Poser, and daughter Lulu Adams—are some of the most fascinating horror filmmakers on the scene. Get thee to a streaming service and watch “The Deeper You Dig” as soon as possible—it’s one of the best horror films of the decade so far—and

Not gonna lie, this had me in the first half. In its first hour, Tina Mabry’s “The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat” is a bubbly, melodramatic story about the multi-decade friendship shared by three Black women. Based on Edward Kelsey Moore’s same-titled novel, the comedy zigs—despite its name, it’s not actually about the musical group—and zags

Movies won’t stop pursuing the next great one crazy night adolescent comedy anytime soon. You know, that “Superbad” formula obliquely indebted to much darker single-night films about hapless grown-ups, like “After Hours.” And in a way, cinema aimed towards young eyeballs is all the richer for it. Without that perpetual effort, we would have never

“Strange Darling,” J.T. Mollner’s self-consciously edgy gotcha of a serial-killer thriller, is so high on its own cleverness that it never stops to think about what it’s actually saying. A pithy way to summarize this movie’s whole vibe would be “If Quentin Tarantino tried to make a ‘#MeToo movie.’” But that’s not fair to Tarantino,

Early in Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, we are introduced to Slater King (Channing Tatum), a tech billionaire, via a television interview where he apologizes for an undisclosed offense. However, the unsaid transgression is no mystery. The setting—an influential, rich white guy in a confessional interview lamenting his behavior and promising to do better—is a familiar