Roger Ebert Reviews

John Woo’s “The Killer” was a true gamechanger, at least for this critic. The one-two punch of Woo’s 1989 action masterpiece with his equally magnificent “Hard Boiled” changed the way I looked at the genre in my teens, and truly inspired hundreds of imitators. For anyone in my age range who can remember watching “The […]

Nathan Silver’s “Between the Temples” opens with a loud, keening blast from the shofar. If you haven’t heard it before, imagine the sound of someone slumped forward in the driver’s seat, face pressed against the steering wheel, and you’ll be in the ballpark. It’s a perfectly bracing note to open this year’s most anxious comedy,

Good movies always have integrity, but not-good movies can have integrity, too. “The Crow,” about a man who is murdered along with the love of his life and comes back from the dead to avenge her, is an vivid example of this principle. It has a lot of elements that don’t work (including a symbolism-laden recurring

Every afternoon, as Xavier (Atibon Nazaire) pulls into his driveway after work, one of his neighbors, like clockwork, walks by his home talking on his cell phone. Sometimes they greet each other, others they simply perform this unspoken, synchronized ritual we can assume has happened for years. Each instance of this interactions is shot from

XL Film Festival & Summit, founded by Creative Cypher’s Troy Pryor, has returned to Hyde Park for year two, once again hosted at Hyde Park’s Polsky Exchange Center. This year, XL Fest expanded with a series of shorts screened around the corner at the Harper Theater for the August 15-18 weekend. Since its reopening in 2021,

The opening twenty minutes of “Close Your Eyes,” the third fiction feature from Spanish director Victor Erice, and his first film in thirty years (his documentary, “The Quince Tree Sun,” came out in 1993; the debut feature that made his reputation was 1973’s “The Spirit of the Beehive”), are as quietly spellbinding as anything you’ll

As the founder of Glass Eye Pix, writer-director Larry Fessenden has spent nearly four decades carving out a fiercely independent niche in American cinema—not only for himself, but also for the array of talented artists whose careers he’s supported through his storied New York film studio.  Since “No Telling,” his first feature on film, Fessenden

Buying a cash-strapped, more losses than wins Welsh football team might seem like an impulsive decision by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney if they had not demonstrated repeatedly that they are two of the savviest and most entrepreneurial forces in Hollywood. Reynolds and McElhenney may not have known much about football (soccer in the US),

We are incredibly proud to present an excerpt from Carrie Rickey‘s new book about the life and work of Agnès Varda, one of the most important filmmakers in the history of the form. The official synopsis is below, followed by the excerpt. The book is available now, and we’ll have a review soon. The first major

Richard Brody, the highly esteemed critic of The New Yorker, would often wish Gena Rowlands a Happy Birthday on the 19th of every June, writing in 2022 that she was “the most inventive, creative, original, transformative actress in the history of cinema.” He wasn’t wrong. And now she’s gone. Our very own Sheila O’Malley wrote