Roger Ebert

Longlegs
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Everything about Osgood Perkins’ “Longlegs” is designed to rattle you, unsettle you, and make you think about it hours or even days later. It’s a very purposefully exaggerated film, from the oppressive sound design to the heavily mannered performances, going...
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Hulu’s “UnPrisoned” Takes Bigger Swings In Its Self-Assured Second Season
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There are lots of shows about trauma but few are as funny or as fun as the Onyx Collective’s “UnPrisoned,” now in its second season. If that sounds like shade, it is not. Loosely based on creator Tracy McMillan’s own...
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Anchorman Wouldn’t Have Been Nearly as Great Without Christina Applegate
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When Jerry Seinfeld took the stage at the Kennedy Center in 2018 to pay tribute to Julia-Louis Dreyfus, who was receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, he told a story about the early days of “Seinfeld.” Before Louis-Dreyfus...
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Sausage Party: Foodtopia Goes Bad Long Before It’s Over
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What if, like, food could talk, man? And what if they said swears and had orgies? Those sentences, I'm sure, billowed out of the presumably hotboxed pitch room of 2016's "Sausage Party," the too-raunchy-by-half adult animated comedy that featured rubbery food...
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Flying to the Moon: Ten Films About the Apollo Program
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Filmmakers have dreamed about visiting the moon from the earliest days if cinema. French stage magician-turned-director George Méliès was the father of cinema special effects. His silent 1902 film “A Trip to the Moon” is still unsurpassed in whimsical charm,...
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On The Same Level: Paul Raci, Clarence Maclin, and Sean Johnson on Sing Sing
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It is increasingly rare to find films in love with actors’ faces, and even rarer to find directors who know how to capture the way light contours around lines and eyes to tell the story of the character. Greg Kwedar’s...
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Big, Big, Big, Big Movies: Jon Landau (1947-2024)
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""I can't act and I can't compose and I can't do visual effects, so I guess that's why I'm producing." That was what Jon Landau said when he accepted the Best Picture Oscar in 1997 for producing James Cameron's "Titanic." He made...
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Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid Ride Again with Criterion’s 50th Anniversary Release
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Sam Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” has about it an air of abeyance, of incompletion spurred by decades of mythology and rumor about its troubled production, contentious post-production, and the personal demons plaguing a director whose prickliness and...
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​Time to Bloom: KiKi Layne on Dandelion
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In “Dandelion,” a struggling Cincinnati singer-songwriter (KiKi Layne, “If Beale Street Could Talk”) is looking for a way to make music for a living when, while performing at a motorcycle rally in South Dakota, she meets Casey (Thomas Doherty), a...
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KVIFF 2024: Wrap-up and Awards
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I love film festivals. It’s as simple as that. You go, usually to a far-flung location, a place on a map that appears unreal at first, to see movies before anyone else. Some are big titles starring glitzy names made...
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