Roger Ebert Reviews

The 28th annual American Black Film Festival (ABFF) announced the Retrospective: Celebrating the Legacy of Denzel Washington program, which will take place on Saturday, June 15. This will include a Q&A with Washington about his life and career, moderated by Rogerebert.com Publisher Chaz Ebert.  ABFF states that this distinguished program is the first of its […]

The Tribeca Film Festival is nearly complete in New York City, an annual event of red carpets, world premieres, and hits from other fests. Tribeca is a tricky festival, one that doesn’t get the worldwide attention of the fall fests but does produce a few memorable films every year, launching them into the world. Here

Jenna Marvin is a fearless 21-year-old queer artist in Russia. Using found objects, layers of makeup and tape, and a jaw-dropping amount of creativity, she manifests otherworldly outfits and strange creatures that seem to have fallen out of a sci-fi TV show and onto the streets of Moscow. Some of her outfits are fun and

In 1991, country superstar Garth Brooks crooned, “Well, it’s bulls and blood/It’s the dust and mud/It’s the roar of a Sunday crowd/It’s the white in the knuckles/The gold in the buckle/He’ll win the next go-’round.” The lyrics, about the ups and downs of a man who dedicates everything to the rodeo lifestyle, rattled around in

Instead of a feature-length movie, “The Grab,” a 106-minute documentary about shady land deals and global food insecurity, often resembles an overstuffed pilot for an over-ambitious new series. The movie’s creators start by making specific connections and anecdotes, mostly focusing on the sale and seizure of land in Zambia and other African countries. Then, they

The Australian-born novelist and essayist Lily Brett is the daughter of Holocaust survivors and writes frequently on that topic and condition. Her 2001 novel Too Many Men is about a father and daughter who travel to Poland to explore the father’s tragic past. One of the book’s many features is a series of conversations the

When it premiered at Tribeca last year, David Duchovny’s “Reverse the Curse” was titled “Bucky F*cking Dent,” which is a title that would have at least given this remarkably lifeless film a bit of personality. It’s also the title of the book, also by Duchovny, on which this maudlin film is based. It’s a story about

“Ghostlight,” which focuses on a construction worker drawn into a production of “Romeo and Juliet,” is a drama about traumatized people healing themselves with art. It’s messy in the way that life is messy. It’s one of those movies that simultaneously feels too long and not long enough. But there’s a purity and earnestness to what it’s doing that’s increasingly

Valérie Donzelli’s “Just the Two of Us” is reminiscent of the “women’s pictures” of the 1930s and ’40s, films like “Stella Dallas,” “Possessed,” “Kitty Foyle,” and “Letter from an Unknown Woman”. These were melodramas, told from the woman’s point of view, dealing with often tragic circumstances: exploitation, having children out of wedlock, man/money problems, and

In “Kinds of Kindness,” you get three Jesse Plemonses (Jesses Plemons?) for the price of one. A darkly comic, deeply weird triptych from Yorgos Lanthimos, the film (which opens June 21) tells three separate stories, each of them starring Plemons, Emma Stone, and Willem Dafoe. In the first, Plemons plays Robert, a tightly wound man