Roger Ebert

When “Caligula" arrived in theaters in 1979, it came in on a tidal wave of hype, most of it on the negative side. The production of Penthouse Magazine publisher Bob Guccione’s grand experiment in creating an adult film that included the elements...

Fittingly, director Tilman Singer’s “Cuckoo” feels very much like a bird's nest in form and theme, namely in how it finds ways to coalesce multiple disparate strands into a cohesive whole.  The film sees seventeen-year-old Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) arriving in the...

“Cuckoo” gets more confusing the more it explains itself. The further writer-director Tilman Singer goes in articulating the strange goings-on that drive this stylish, unsettling thriller, the less compelling it becomes.    Trying to comprehend the hows and whys of...

In 2013, Angela Patton gave a TEDXWomen Talk that went viral. She spoke about a program she created in Richmond, Virginia, to bring girls and their incarcerated fathers together in an environment that would make the fathers and daughters feel...

The crimes of the Catholic Church are no secret to most citizens of the Western world. Yet, as is the case with many historical recollections, the deliverance of information is often filtered through a lens of whiteness, and victims of...

The tricky part with a docuseries like “Hollywood Black,” particularly if you have a deep reservoir of knowledge about its chosen subject, is realizing that it’ll probably never be as comprehensive as you’d like. After all, the four-part series directed...

It’s hard to imagine that this summer will see a better crowd-pleaser than “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In,” a nostalgic Hong Kong action spectacular featuring the year’s most thrilling action filmmaking. Unbound by physics or any sense of psychological...

There's a scene in "Not Not Jazz," a film about the fusion jazz trio Medeski Martin & Wood, where the camera prowls slowly around bassist Chris Wood as he slowly saws his upright bass on an upstate New York tennis court...

In the wake of Quentin Tarantino’s ascendance to his pop culture throne in the ‘90s, dozens of imitators tried to mimic his approach to filmmaking, only to fall flat on their faces. It turns out that what he does is much...

The final words of his 1953 novel “The Unnamable” — “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” — are among the most famous written by Irish poet, playwright, essayist, and novelist Samuel Beckett. They epitomize both the hopelessness and the senseless...