Author: Roger Ebert

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…

Poor Kim Mills. She doesn’t even have her driver’s license yet and she’s been kidnapped by sex-traffickers in Paris and terrorists in Istanbul. This despite her having a father so protective that he implants a GPS app in her iPhone and bursts in on her making out with her sweet, polite boyfriend. I suppose the…

William Friedkin’s “Killer Joe” is one hell of a movie. It left me speechless. I can’t say I loved it. I can’t say I hated it. It is expertly directed, flawlessly cast, and written with merciless black humor by Tracy Letts. It’s about the Smiths, the stupidest family I’ve ever seen in a movie that’s…

In 1984 Tim Burton launched his career with a live-action short named “Frankenweenie,” and now he returns to that material for the new “Frankenweenie,” which is a stop-action black-and-white comedy inspired by “The Bride of Frankenstein” and countless other classic horror films in which science runs amok. The story takes place in a familiar Burtonesque…

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” is fabulously well-acted and crafted, but when I reach for it, my hand closes on air. It has rich material and isn’t clear what it thinks about it. It has two performances of Oscar caliber, but do they connect? Its title character is transparently inspired by L. Ron Hubbard, the…

“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…

Gus has been a baseball scout so long he can judge a batter by the sound when his bat connects with the ball. Did he always have this ability, or did it develop in recent years when his eyesight began to fail? The Atlanta Braves are on the edge of retiring him, but not if…

The hero of Mike Birbiglia’s “Sleepwalk With Me” is a standup comic who suffers from REM Behavior Disorder. One night in a motel in Walla Walla, he leaps through a second-floor window and escapes death but has to have glass splinters removed from his legs. His doctor tells him to start using a sleeping bag…

Almost every word Ernest Hemingway wrote in the years immediately before 1922 was lost by his first wife, Hadley, who packed the pages in a briefcase and lost it on a train. Hardly an American lit student lives who has not heard this story. Hemingway’s lost prose lives on, in a sense, in the movie…

“Robot and Frank” tells the story of relationship between a retired burglar and a household appliance more relentless than an alarm clock. Frank is a man who lives alone in a bucolic house in upstate New York, and is somewhere along the slope into dementia. He’s still able to feed and care for himself and…