Roger Ebert

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Zombies don’t have to be fast. It’s a fun novelty sometimes, sure. But the essence of zombies as a horror subgenre is best expressed as a feeling of creeping dread, the idea that something horrible is coming and there’s nothing...

Like many people of my approximate age, my childhood was heavily touched and influenced by the work of Jim Henson. I adored the craziness of "The Muppet Show"—which made it stand out from the comparatively bland other things being offered...

The personal essay film is a tricky genre, because when you get right down to it, who cares? Sure, there is a brotherhood of man and all that, but is it such that we’ll be interested enough in a brother’s...

Despite what everyone says, weddings aren’t really about the bride and groom. They’re about the community surrounding them, parents and siblings and friends and coworkers and cousins they haven’t seen in three years who are stuck in traffic and won’t...