Roger Ebert

A Farewell from Our Literary Editor, Matt Fagerholm
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Matt Fagerholm has been a gem to work with at RogerEbert.com, and I am simultaneously sad to see him go, while overjoyed for him about the project he is undertaking. This Farewell Article contains some of his best work. Onward...
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Berlin Film Festival 2024: Who Do I Belong To, Memories Of A Burning Body, Sons
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In Berlin’s Main Competition and its Panorama section are three films centering mothers: the worries they have about their children, the memories of their lived experiences, and the ache they feel when they lose a child. These maternal stories are...
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Berlin Film Festival 2024: Demba, The Strangers’ Case, Black Tea
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Syria and Turkey, the Ivory Coast and China, Senegal, and a smidge of America are the countries these three films take place in. With this globetrotting dispatch is a story about a husband grieving the memory of his wife, Middle...
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Berlin Film Festival 2024: The Roundup: Punishment, Last Swim, Through The Rocks And Clouds
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Not every dispatch has a unifying theme; this one is more of a hodgepodge. Among the three films is the latest installment of a highly successful Korean action franchise, a coming-of-age character study of a British-Iranian girl battling suicidal ideations,...
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They Shot the Piano Player
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Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba, who co-directed “They Shot the Piano Player,” first encountered the work of the film’s subject, Brazilian keyboardist Francisco Tenorio Júnior, in a record store twenty years ago. Trueba was so enraptured by the music that he...
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The Enduring Laughs—and Life—of Harold Ramis
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My late husband Roger Ebert noted potential in Harold Ramis from the moment he awarded four stars to the first film that the "SCTV" star co-wrote, 1978's hit comedy, "National Lampoon's Animal House." "The movie is vulgar, raunchy, ribald, and occasionally scatological,"...
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The Internet Will Never Let Russell Crowe Forget Les Miserables
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Director Tom Hooper had just won an Oscar for “The King’s Speech” and now he had his sights set on an even more technically ambitious undertaking, a big-screen, live-singing version of the beloved musical war horse “Les Misérables.” Casting Broadway...
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Berlin Film Festival 2024: Honoree Martin Scorsese Honors Powell and Pressburger
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(Pictured: Portraits of Martin Scorsese at the Berlinale Palast. As filmmakers and cast members enter the theater for screenings, they autograph the photos—a process that the audience inside watches on the big screen.) Keeping up with Martin Scorsese at the...
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About Dry Grasses
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Everybody lies. Whether with malice, for self-preservation, or to spare another’s heart, fabrications lubricate or erode social interactions. But it’s in the liminal space between the idea of absolute certainty — an unattainable utopia — and the most outlandish of...
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Seagrass
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“Do you need a reason to be unhappy,” asks Carol (Sarah Gadon) in Meredith Hama-Brown’s effective character study “Seagrass,” the story of how grief often begets other repressed emotions and possibly even tragedies. There’s something fascinating in that question in...
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