Author: Roger Ebert

“Cowboys & Aliens” has, without any doubt, the most cockamamie plot I’ve witnessed in many a moon. Here is a movie with cowboys, aliens, Apaches, horses, spaceships, a murdering stagecoach robber, a preacher, bug-eyed monsters, a bartender named Doc, a tyrannical rancher who lives outside of a town named Absolution, his worthless son, two sexy…

“Tamara Drewe” is one of those British comedies in which, one way or another, we envy all of the characters — even, briefly, the one run over by stampeding cows. If one must be vain, lustful, egotistical or long-suffering, let it be here, at a writers’ retreat in the Dorset village of Ewedown, where everyone…

I don’t fully understand the working of the derivatives and credit swaps we’ve heard so much about. But I’m learning. These are ingenious, computer-driven schemes in which good money can be earned from bad debt, and Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe pocket untold millions while they bankrupt their investors and their companies. This process…

In “Stone,” Robert De Niro and Edward Norton, in top form, play against type in a psychological duel between a parole officer and a tricky prisoner who has his number. Norton plays Gerald Creeson, imprisoned for his role in a crime that resulted in the murder of his grandparents and the burning of their house.…

John Lennon wrote the song “Julia” about his mother, and it is a strangely objective love song, as if about a real girlfriend and not a mom. Perhaps that’s how he thought of her. When he was very young, he came under the care of his Aunt Mimi, whom he regarded as his mother. The…

In my will, I have left to the next generation such parts of my poor body that it can salvage. That is the Golden Rule. I suppose if you take it literally, you would accept life as a Donor in “Never Let Me Go,” because after all, that is the purpose for which you were…

Three mothers in need of a child. Three children, one not yet born. Three lives that are obscurely linked. Rodrigo García has made his career of films sympathetic to the feelings of women, and “Mother and Child” is so emotionally affecting because it is concerned only with feelings. The story lines coil and eventually join,…

“Grown Ups” is a pleasant, genial, good-hearted, sometimes icky comedy that’s like spending a weekend with well-meaning people you don’t want to see again any time soon. They’re the kind of people of whom, in the car driving home, you ask, “What was that all about?” Imagine the Three Stooges slapping each other’s faces with…

There is an evil-tempered old woman in “Please Give” whose greatest accomplishment is having survived into her 90s without being pushed down a steep flight of stairs. She finds fault with everyone and everything, is ungrateful, is a whiner, and brings nothing to the party. 
How do people like this live with themselves? Her next-door…