Roger Ebert Reviews

Like the Jedi and the Sith, the “Star Wars” universe of late has felt like a dueling dyad of creative directions for the franchise—each battling for supremacy on the now-fertile ground of Disney+. Some entries, like “Ahsoka” and the later seasons of “The Mandalorian” (and, frankly, “Star Wars, Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker”), view the […]

This should be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: Go watch the movie first. Scroll down, watch it, then scroll back up and read the review and Q&A. Part of the joy of doing this piece every month is the discovery process, of hitting ‘play’ and not knowing what you’re getting. “The Year of Staring

For years, live-action was director Pablo Berger’s playground, but he always had that animation dog inside him. His Oscar-nominated animated feature “Robot Dreams” let him release his bark. Full of charm, soul, and warmth, “Robot Dreams” is a cinematic triumph in animation storytelling. It’s a poetic tale about the deep, loving connections we strike with

On the 7th of June, I’ll be 35 years old. If we’re being very optimistic, this isn’t exactly the start of middle age, but I don’t know what else to call it. I’ve been paying attention to the news and the weather lately, and they haven’t been putting me in a great mood. So with mortality’s

One of my great great great grandfathers fought for the Union and survived the Battle of Antietam. After his infantry unit was wiped out, he survived by crawling under a heap of corpses and staying there for two days. As a child, I often found myself thinking about a person doing what he did and

Early on in the new Richard Linklater comedy “Hit Man,” the film’s main character, a nice-guy teacher named Gary (Glen Powell), informs the audience of a truth they may not want to hear: Hit men aren’t real. “It’s a total pop-culture fantasy,” he says in voiceover. “But because hit men have been a staple of

Opening this year’s section is Jonathan Millet’s “Ghost Trail,” in which a Syrian war refugee (Adam Bessa) hunts his former torturer through France while struggling to heal from the scars, both literal and figurative, that his quarry left him with.  Once a literature professor in Aleppo before he was imprisoned by the government, subjected to

Like many people of my approximate age, my childhood was heavily touched and influenced by the work of Jim Henson. I adored the craziness of “The Muppet Show”—which made it stand out from the comparatively bland other things being offered up as children’s entertainment at that time—and found myself relating to a number of the

The personal essay film is a tricky genre, because when you get right down to it, who cares? Sure, there is a brotherhood of man and all that, but is it such that we’ll be interested enough in a brother’s struggles that we’re willing to sit with them for a while in a movie theater,

Zombies don’t have to be fast. It’s a fun novelty sometimes, sure. But the essence of zombies as a horror subgenre is best expressed as a feeling of creeping dread, the idea that something horrible is coming and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Executed properly, the slowness can actually enhance the terror,