Roger Ebert Reviews

I must admit that I went into the third season of Max’s award-winning “Hacks” expecting to see a show on the other side of its peak. How do you keep this premise fresh for that many seasons, especially when it ended with what could have been finality last season? Much to my surprise, the writers […]

“You can’t get a head start if you aim for perfection,” a clueless moneyed entrepreneur muses during a video chat with his two shell-shocked subordinates in the new film from writer-director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. In the context of the actual conversation the sentiment is even more inane than it sounds on the face of it. And

With “Evil Does Not Exist,” his enigmatic follow-up to the Oscar-winning drama “Drive My Car,” Ryûsuke Hamaguchi stages an ominous, slow-burning thriller deep in the Japanese wilderness. There, in the small village of Mizubiki, not far from Tokyo, the residents live in relative harmony with nature, chopping wood, gathering wild wasabi, and drawing pristine water

The unexpected global success of “Pulp Fiction” in 1994 spawned a wave of wannabes and cash-ins, many of them mixing and matching elements that they thought made Quentin Tarantino’s movie a success: Violence, drugs, ostentatiously declamatory dialogue and monologues, time-shifting stories. Of course, the real reason for its success was that it had a singular

“Terrestrial Verses,” one of the most brilliant and provocative films to emerge from Iran recently, has qualities that link it to both the modernist formal traditions of post-1979 Iranian cinema and the more recent trend of social and political asperities aimed at the authoritarian repressiveness of the Islamic Republic. The film’s stylistic approach is both

Across a strikingly monotone desert landscape a figure cloaked in black rides atop a horse. It’s a vision that instantly recalls the horsemen of the apocalypse. But when the rider dismounts the horse at the first sight of water and removes her breast from her robes, filling the oasis with breast milk, we are spellbound

I watched “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed” on headphones, in my room, trying to stay out of sight while my roommate had a date over. This is, if not the ideal way to experience this film, at least an appropriate one. Joanna Arnow’s second feature is a symphony of ambient

The Cronenberg cinematic family tree adds another branch this week with the directorial debut of Caitlin Cronenberg’s “Humane,” starring Jay Baruchel, Peter Gallagher, and Emily Hampshire. Anyone coming to this film for more of the body horror imagery in the work of David Cronenberg or Brandon Cronenberg should mostly temper expectations of surreal terror. But

Being a fan of the Christian pop duo for KING & COUNTRY or having even the slightest interest in the musical genre probably goes a long way toward making the drama “Unsung Hero” more meaningful. For everyone else, it plays like a blandly well-intentioned tale of triumph over adversity and an earnest celebration of the importance of

Several enemies of the state are murdered on live TV in a pivotal scene from “Boy Kills World,” a hyper-action movie about a media-addicted killer who wants to avenge his family’s deaths. We don’t know who these TV casualties are or what people think of their deaths, but we do know that their killers are