Roger Ebert

Hit Man
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People like to speak about a golden era of movies—the precise dimensions of which often shift based on the generation of the speaker—when Hollywood made products that were sexier, smarter, and just generally better. Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” is for them. ...
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Netflix’s Tires Should Have Fans of Shane Gillis Rolling
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Getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to Shane Gillis. In 2019, the stand-up comedian was announced as a new cast member of “Saturday Night Live,” but then podcast footage surfaced in which Gillis used ethnic slurs (he...
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Cannes 2024: Marcello Mio, Parthenope, Elementary
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Chiara Mastroianni really does resemble her dad. Near the beginning of Christophe Honoré's "Marcello Mio," she has a dream in which she looks in the mirror and sees her famous father, Marcello Mastroianni, staring back. Telling her equally famous mother,...
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Fantastic Start to Fourth Season of Evil Maintains Creepy Quality
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“Doesn’t it seem like these assignments are getting weirder?” There’s no program on television more wonderfully weird than “Evil.” Even the journey of this show’s broadcast has been incredibly weird: It started on CBS, moved to Paramount+, recently dropped two...
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West Side Oratory: Judas and the Black Messiah
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As I type this essay, students across the country are encamped in university quads. Protesting American Imperialism, by way of protesting their universities’ investments in war profiteers. They are most vocal about the final obliterations of Gaza. As a longtime...
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Cannes 2024 Video #4: Jason Gorber on Canada’s Films
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The Cannes Film Festival is underway, and Chaz Ebert is on the ground to report on every development. In this video, Canadian correspondent Jason Gorber briefly mentions the Canadian films highlighting the festival this year before discussing "Universal Language" and "Black Dog"...
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Cannes 2024: Anora, Limonov, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
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The films of Sean Baker ("The Florida Project," "Red Rocket") invariably focus on people who live on the margins. If there's a difference in "Anora," his latest feature, it's that the protagonist is almost immediately put on a fast track...
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The Legacy of David Bordwell; or, The Memorial Service as Network Narrative
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The memorial for film scholar David Bordwell was as funny, erudite, and thorough as the master’s own writing on cinema. Organized by his widow and regular writing partner Kristin Thompson, it was also an example of a type of storytelling...
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Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 Wastes Its Potential
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It’s okay for stories to end, and when I rolled credits on 2017's “Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice,” I thought Ninja Theory, its developer, understood that as well. Senua, a woman who hears voices and was thought cursed by those around her,...
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Living Through Words: Ethan Hawke on His Career, Poetry, and Wildcat
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By-the-books biopics are a dime a dozen and often result in a shallow portrait of their subject. But every once in a while you'll get a filmmaker whose film's unconventional form perfectly aligns with the singular talent at its heart....
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