Roger Ebert

Cannes 2024: Ghost Trail, Block Pass
||
Opening this year’s section is Jonathan Millet’s “Ghost Trail,” in which a Syrian war refugee (Adam Bessa) hunts his former torturer through France while struggling to heal from the scars, both literal and figurative, that his quarry left him with. ...
continue reading
At the Movies, It’s Hard Out There for a Hit Man
||
Early on in the new Richard Linklater comedy “Hit Man,” the film’s main character, a nice-guy teacher named Gary (Glen Powell), informs the audience of a truth they may not want to hear: Hit men aren’t real. “It’s a total...
continue reading
Far, Far Away: How to Get People Going to Movies Again
||
What's broken in moviegoing? And how can it be fixed? Why do I ask?  Surprise: It's not because of the box office performance of "Furiosa: A Mad Max Tale" and "The Garfield Movie" over the 2024 Memorial Day weekend.  Sure, it was the worst such...
continue reading
Young Woman and the Sea
||
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...
continue reading
Ren Faire
||
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,...
continue reading
What You Wish For
||
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...
continue reading
Robot Dreams
||
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...
continue reading
In a Violent Nature
||
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...
continue reading
Ezra
||
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...
continue reading
Handling the Undead
||
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...
continue reading