Author: Roger Ebert

Osama bin Laden is dead, which everybody knows, and the principal facts leading up to that are well-known. The decision to market “Zero Dark Thirty” as a thriller, therefore, takes a certain amount of courage, even given the fascination with this most zero and dark of deaths (the title is spy-speak for “half-past midnight,” the…

Bill Murray wasn’t my first thought for an actor to play President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he may have been the right choice for “Hyde Park on Hudson.” The role requires him to show Roosevelt as a sometimes lonely and sad man whose vacation getaway is his mother’s family mansion, Springwood, near Hyde Park in…

Pat is curiously confident and upbeat for a man just released from a mental hospital and under a restraining order from his ex-wife. That’s because he’s determined to repair the damage he’s done to his life and surprise everyone by moving ever onward and upward. His motto is “Excelsior!” What stage of bipolar disorder would…

“End of Watch” is one of the best police movies in recent years, a virtuoso joining of performances and often startling action. It stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena as Taylor and Zavala, two Los Angeles street cops who bend a few rules but must be acknowledged as heroes. After too many police movies about…

Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary are two of the most notorious fallen women in literature. Karenina is prepared to lose all the advantages of high society in favor of the man she loves. Bovary abandons the man who loves her in an attempt to social climb. As portrayed by Leo Tolstoy and Gustave Flaubert, both…

I’ve rarely been more aware than during Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” that Abraham Lincoln was a plain-spoken, practical, down-to-earth man from the farmlands of Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois. He had less than a year of formal education, and taught himself through his hungry reading of great books. I still recall from a childhood book the image…

You can tell from his reedy voice that speaking, for Mark, is an effort. He’s 38 years old and after contracting polio, he has spent most of those years in an iron lung. His body is thin and twisted. He depends on Vera, his caregiver, to wheel him around on a gurney during the few…

In this 50th year of the James Bond series, with the dismal “Quantum of Solace” (2008) still in our minds, “Skyfall” triumphantly reinvents 007 in one of the best Bonds ever made. This is a full-blooded, joyous, intelligent celebration of a beloved cultural icon, with Daniel Craig taking full possession of a role he earlier…

I’ll begin by putting my cards on the table. Although I can understand why surfing has its charm, there was also a moment in “Chasing Mavericks” when it seems to embody insanity. After once-in-a-decade weather conditions cause legendary waves north of Santa Cruz to swell to terrifying proportions, a reasonable surfer would stay on the…

All of my previous selves still survive somewhere inside of me, and my previous adolescent would have loved “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” The movie has received glowing reviews, and some snarky ones that seem to have been written by previous adults. The film is about an alienated freshman in high school who sees…