Roger Ebert Reviews

Minhal Baig’s “We Grown Now” is a film masterfully tied to the emotive potential of place. A period piece centered in Cabrini-Green in the early ’90s, the film is as Chicago born and bred as the characters it loves throughout its runtime. Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) are two young boys, […]

Will there ever be a version of “Rebel Moon—Part 2: The Scargiver” that makes the movie and its franchise seem essential? Director and co-writer Zack Snyder has already tried to whip up his fanbase by teasing “R-rated” versions of the first two entries in his ongoing “Star Wars” ripoff cycle, a lifeless homage to that

It’s hard to think of a contemporary mainstream male filmmaker who consistently writes better female characters than Alex Garland. Before his directorial career began, he primarily focused on stories about men: his novel The Beach (which was adapted for the Leonardo DiCaprio film) and the screenplays to “28 Days Later,” “Sunshine” and “Dredd.” It certainly

“What made you talk to them?” “Still kinda putting that together in my own mind.” That really is the impossible question at the center of HBO’s wildly influential “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” isn’t it? Why did Robert Durst talk to Andrew Jarecki? What compelled a man who had seemingly gotten

For the past twenty-five years, Chaz Ebert and the College of Media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have hosted the Ebertfest Film Festival at the Virginia Theatre in Champaign, Illinois. Roger Ebert was the first Film Critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for film criticism. He held his colleagues in esteem. Since his death, Chaz Ebert

The fact-based “Hard Miles” begins with a failure. Social worker Greg Townsend (Matthew Modine) urges a judge to allow the resident of a facility for teenage boys who have been in trouble to allow him to stay there, even though he pushed another boy. Townsend explains that he was protecting someone else, not instigating violence.

At the end of “The Beekeeper,” an amazing thing happens: they fade to black and roll the credits. I saw the film earlier this year (it’s on home video now and worth $5) and was slightly flummoxed. Written and directed by David Ayer (“Fury“), it stars Jason Statham as a former commando turned vigilante waging violent warfare against

Despite its gently bummed-out vibe, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is a sneakily powerful film. It’s so affecting, in fact, that I get a little sad just thinking about the story and characters. Even though I saw “Eternal Sunshine” twice in a theater when it came out and put it on my 2004 Top

“The Hands of Orlac,” a twisty and lurid 1924 Austrian psychodrama, was the last movie I saw in New Orleans at the Overlook Film Festival. The four day-long festival’s revival of the century-old silent movie, about a celebrated pianist who believes he’s haunted by the spirit of a killer, felt like an event thanks in

Just when you think they’ve run out of real-life World War II stories to turn into blockbuster movies than some documents get declassified, inspiring or at least suggesting new sagas of heroism. This new movie about a small mission of Allied fighters killing Nazis on a grand scale wherever they go, directed by Guy Ritchie