Author: BY ROGER EBERT
-
REVIEW: ‘Celeste and Jesse’ face forever
“Celeste and Jesse Forever” is a good-hearted romantic comedy about a likable couple — so likable, indeed, that it swims upstream against the current of our desires. The two have been happily married for years, long enough that their friends think of them as a unit, and now they’ve decided she’ll stay in the house…
-
REVIEW: ‘Lawless’ is blood and guts violent
“Lawless” is a well-made film about ignorant and violent people. Like “Killer Joe” of four weeks ago, I can only admire the craftsmanship and acting, and regret its failure to rise above them. Its characters live by a barbaric code that honors murder. They live or die in a relentless hail of gunfire. It’s not…
-
REVIEW: Suspend reality and fall in love with ‘Timothy Green’
BUY TICKETS “The Odd Life of Timothy Green” is a warm and lovely fantasy, the kind of full-bodied family film that is being pushed aside in favor of franchises and slam-bang confusion. On a picture-postcard farm in the middle of endlessly rolling hills where it is always Indian summer, a lovable boy comes into the…
-
REVIEW: ‘Step Up’ one more time — again
BUY TICKETS Name this plot: The gang all hangs out near the beach and has a way of spontaneously breaking out into dance. A pretty girl is new in town. She’s an outsider until the leader of the beach crowd befriends her. Life’s a holiday until an evil real estate developer comes along and wants…
-
REVIEW: Batman trilogy finale ‘honorable’ but just misses
BUY TICKETS “The Dark Knight Rises” leaves the fanciful early days of the superhero genre far behind and moves into a doom-shrouded, apocalyptic future that seems uncomfortably close to today’s headlines. As urban terrorism and class warfare envelop Gotham, and its infrastructure is ripped apart, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) emerges reluctantly from years of seclusion…
-
REVIEW: Spidey’s amazing past is revealed
We live in an age of speed-up, which may explain why the Spider-Man franchise feels the need for a reboot only 10 years after its first picture, and five years after the most recent one. In its broad strokes, “The Amazing Spider-Man” is a remake of Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” (2002), but it’s not the broad…
-
REVIEW: Believe it or not, teddy-bear ‘Ted’ is crude, gross and really funny
BUY TICKETS The funniest movie character so far this year is a stuffed teddy bear. And the best comedy screenplay so far is “Ted,” the saga of the bear’s friendship with a 35-year-old man-child. I know; this was also hard for me to believe. After memories of Mel Gibson’s bond with a sock puppet, “Ted”…
-
REVIEW: Wait for punch line in ‘People Like Us’
BUY TICKETS “People Like Us” is a good-hearted and well-intentioned film that depends on a movie device we could name The 90-Minute Delay. That describes the technique of waiting through most of a movie for one simple line to be spoken that would clear up all of the confusion. In this case, that line would…
-
REVIEW: ‘Safety’ goes time traveling without smirking
BUY TICKETS Few descriptions of “Safety Not Guaranteed” will do it justice. It’s a more ambitious and touching movie than seems possible given its starting point, which is this classified ad in an alternative newspaper: “WANTED: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You’ll get paid after we get…
-
REVIEW: Kids will love it, ‘Brave’ adults might pick it apart
BUY TICKETS “Brave” is the new animated film from Pixar, and therefore becomes the film the parents of the world will be dragged to by their kids. The good news is that the kids will probably love it, and the bad news is that parents will be disappointed if they’re hoping for another Pixar groundbreaker.…