Author: Roger Ebert

We are all of us engaged in the trade of buying and selling time. When we stop smoking, we hope we are buying years. When we drink and drive, we are willing to sell a few years. But those are gambles with the odds. “In Time” is a science fiction movie in which time is…

In the early 1960s, after he had discovered booze but before he had stumbled across drugs, the young Hunter S. Thompson got an uncertain start in journalism. By the time he was 20, he had already been fired as a copy boy for Time magazine for “insubordination,” and from the Middletown (N.Y.) Daily Record for…

There’s one thing to be said for a remake of a 1984 movie that uses the original screenplay. This 2011 version is so similar — sometimes song for song and line for line — that I was wickedly tempted to reprint my 1984 review, word for word. But That Would Be Wrong. I think I…

Young people should not get sick and die. Most of us do eventually, but how sad it is to learn in your 20s that you have a dangerous cancer and your chances of survival are 50/50. How crueler still if the news is delivered by a doctor who seems almost deliberately sadistic. Start with those…

As an actor, Brendan Gleeson is a fact of life. Tall, shaggy, not thin, he demonstrates that it takes a heap o’ living to make a body a character. Cast him in a role, and the plot and dialogue become adornments. In “The Guard,” he is paired with the equally effective actor Don Cheadle, who…

I would rather eat a golf ball than see this movie again. It tells the dreadful parable of a pro golfer who was abused by his dad, melts down in the Texas Open, and stumbles into the clutches of an insufferable geezer in the town of Utopia (pop. 375) who promises him that after seven…

“Another Earth” is a film animated by one stunning image: A new planet four times the size of the moon appears in the sky of Earth. This startling apparition gives a deeper meaning to everything in the story, especially when it is discovered that the planet is, as the title promises, another Earth. Perhaps not…

I should do a little more research, but I think “30 Minutes or Less” is the first R-rated slacker comedy based on a true recent story in which a man was blown up by a bomb strapped around his neck. You may recall the 2003 case of a pizza delivery man who dreamed up a…