Roger Ebert

John Woo’s “The Killer” was a true gamechanger, at least for this critic. The one-two punch of Woo’s 1989 action masterpiece with his equally magnificent “Hard Boiled” changed the way I looked at the genre in my teens, and truly...

“Strange Darling,” J.T. Mollner’s self-consciously edgy gotcha of a serial-killer thriller, is so high on its own cleverness that it never stops to think about what it’s actually saying. A pithy way to summarize this movie’s whole vibe would be...

The opening twenty minutes of “Close Your Eyes,” the third fiction feature from Spanish director Victor Erice, and his first film in thirty years (his documentary, “The Quince Tree Sun,” came out in 1993; the debut feature that made his...

On a rainy weekend in Chicago, MUBI, the indie film streaming powerhouse that champions both emerging and established filmmakers, launched MUBI FEST, an international film festival. MUBI FEST is about building community around the love of film, transcending the limits of...

XL Film Festival & Summit, founded by Creative Cypher’s Troy Pryor, has returned to Hyde Park for year two, once again hosted at Hyde Park’s Polsky Exchange Center. This year, XL Fest expanded with a series of shorts screened around the...

Locarno was a tricky festival to navigate. Usually, when I attend a festival, I’m forced to keep my eye on the newest titles and open my ears to the latest buzz, retooling my schedule on the fly to catch a film...

Last year, at the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, I saw a newly restored version of "Tony Arzenta" (called "No Way Out" in the U.S.), a 1973 Italian thriller from director Duccio Tessari, although even in that sophisticated audience...

Phil Donahue, who passed away on August 18 at the age of 88, did not introduce the television talk show, of course—Joe Franklin is credited with beginning the first one back in 1951, and this was followed a couple of...

As the founder of Glass Eye Pix, writer-director Larry Fessenden has spent nearly four decades carving out a fiercely independent niche in American cinema—not only for himself, but also for the array of talented artists whose careers he’s supported through...

We are incredibly proud to present an excerpt from Carrie Rickey's new book about the life and work of Agnès Varda, one of the most important filmmakers in the history of the form. The official synopsis is below, followed by the...