Roger Ebert Reviews

“Doesn’t it seem like these assignments are getting weirder?” There’s no program on television more wonderfully weird than “Evil.” Even the journey of this show’s broadcast has been incredibly weird: It started on CBS, moved to Paramount+, recently dropped two seasons on Netflix that have been in the top ten for weeks, and will now […]

As I type this essay, students across the country are encamped in university quads. Protesting American Imperialism, by way of protesting their universities’ investments in war profiteers. They are most vocal about the final obliterations of Gaza. As a longtime educator and chaplain in Chicago, I have current students in those encampments, as well as

The Cannes Film Festival is underway, and Chaz Ebert is on the ground to report on every development. In this video, Canadian correspondent Jason Gorber briefly mentions the Canadian films highlighting the festival this year before discussing “Universal Language” and “Black Dog” in depth. Watch the video below. The Cannes Film Festival is underway, and Chaz Ebert is on the

The films of Sean Baker (“The Florida Project,” “Red Rocket“) invariably focus on people who live on the margins. If there’s a difference in “Anora,” his latest feature, it’s that the protagonist is almost immediately put on a fast track to great wealth. The movie stars Mikey Madison (“Better Things”), in a deeply moving, verbally and

The memorial for film scholar David Bordwell was as funny, erudite, and thorough as the master’s own writing on cinema. Organized by his widow and regular writing partner Kristin Thompson, it was also an example of a type of storytelling that David coined a term to describe: the “network narrative.”  As David wrote in a

It’s okay for stories to end, and when I rolled credits on 2017’s “Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice,” I thought Ninja Theory, its developer, understood that as well. Senua, a woman who hears voices and was thought cursed by those around her, overcame the grief and trauma of losing loved ones and learned to accept herself—all of

By-the-books biopics are a dime a dozen and often result in a shallow portrait of their subject. But every once in a while you’ll get a filmmaker whose film’s unconventional form perfectly aligns with the singular talent at its heart. Such is the case with co-writer and director Ethan Hawke’s “Wildcat,” starring his daughter Maya

“STAX: Soulsville USA” is a four-part, four-hour series about the legendary Memphis soul music label’s rise and fall, and its impact on American culture and history.  Stax was founded in 1957 by siblings who bonded over their love of music: country fiddle player Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton, who took out a second mortgage on her house to finance the construction of

Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice,” a portrait of the friendship between Donald Trump and Roy Cohn, leaves little doubt about who is top dog. The film is so thoroughly owned by Jeremy Strong, who plays Cohn, that the ostensibly headline-grabbing notion of having a Trump biopic compete at Cannes almost seems beside the point. With a

Critics Week at Cannes, of course, is where new rising filmmakers are often found, mostly presenting their first feature. Sometimes there’s an obvious theme to be sussed out, but mostly the spiritual theme is the energy of young filmmakers plying their trade. The three films in this dispatch have some light parallels, two of them