Roger Ebert Reviews

The most fascinating thing about Chris Nash’s hyperviolent slasher experiment “In a Violent Nature” is that it’s not scary. At least, not in the way that the “Friday the 13th“-esque splatter flicks he’s clearly riffing on used to be. There are no jump scares, few bouts of high-wire tension, and no ambiguity about who the final […]

Last month, I was a juror in the Narrative Feature category at the Florida Film Festival; one of the films, “Hellbent on Boogie,” directed by Vito Trupiano, was about an autistic teenager (Alyx Ruibal) being homeschooled by her mother and kept in isolation from her peers. The portrayal of neurodivergence has an authenticity one doesn’t

The issue of the spoiler remains a critical one in cinematic discourse. At this moment, it weighs on this reviewer particularly heavily. “What You Wish For,” a picture written and directed by Nicholas Tomnay and starring Nick Stahl, is one that I went into relatively cold, and that contributed significantly to my enjoyment of the

Pablo Berger’s “Robot Dreams” is a lovely fable about partnership and imagination, a movie that uses the form of animated cinema to tell a story in a way that couldn’t be possible in any other medium. Without a word of dialogue, the director of “Blancanieves” casts a spell, crafting a film that is often truly

Daisy Ridley battles jellyfish and the patriarchy with equal pluck and aplomb in “Young Woman and the Sea.”   Ridley stars in this compelling biographical drama as Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim across the English Channel. Ederle accomplished this feat in 1926—nearly a century before the open-water swimming triumph depicted in last year’s Oscar-nominated

Lance Oppenheim’s three-part HBO docuseries “Ren Faire” walks that fine line between mocking and celebrating its incredibly unique subjects. I told a friend just now that I was reviewing a docuseries about a “Succession”-esque power struggle at a Renaissance fair, and he said, “So, a comedy?” Yes and no. While aspects of “Ren Faire” are

What’s broken in moviegoing? And how can it be fixed? Why do I ask?  Surprise: It’s not because of the box office performance of “Furiosa: A Mad Max Tale” and “The Garfield Movie” over the 2024 Memorial Day weekend.  Sure, it was the worst such weekend for the industry in decades. Neither did poorly, in any real meaning of the word,

One of the major stories out of Cannes this year is the world premiere of two new films by Omnes Films, an experimental LA-based collective whose micro-budget features, including Tyler Taormina’s “Ham on Rye” and Jonathan Davies’ “Topology of Sirens,” have all, to date, displayed a striking formal command and mesmeric attention to ambiance. These

10 NEW TO NETFLIX “Dark Waters““The Equalizer““The Gentlemen““The Peanut Butter Falcon““Shrek““A Simple Favor““Sing Street““Starship Troopers““Traffic”“Upgrade“ 12 NEW ON BLU-RAY/DVD “All That Breathes” (Criterion) One of the best documentaries of the 2020s has been given the Janus Contemporaries treatment, the new branch of Criterion that’s releasing recent arthouse critical darlings like “EO” and “Godland.” My love

When the Los Angeles Lakers got a prestige HBO mini-series in “Winning Time,” it seemed only a matter of time before that other team in the City of Angels got in on the action. Sadly, the most interesting recent story in the history of the Los Angeles Clippers happened mostly off the court. After years of