André de Toth fled Hungary before the second world war and relocated to the US where he made westerns and films noir attacking American complacency in its everyday iterations, a more sly, less expressionistic Fritz Lang, who allowed his audience to put together puzzle pieces and see the picture of corruption ourselves (to quote Martin Scorsese, his most … Read more
Jonathan Glazer has always skirted the mainstream without becoming part of it. Maybe it’s his interest in the destruction of the self that will always keep him at arm’s length; maybe it’s a formal alienation that insists you stare headlong into the abyss while he watches you do so. It’s an impish strategy and it has yielded … Read more
It may seem like it but it’s not every day a living legend releases a movie at the local multiplex and it just sort of passes from discussion in a couple of days. On this site, Matt Zoller Seitz, a man who knows, gave John Woo’s “Silent Night” one of the few positive reviews I read, but … Read more
It would be nicer to enter 2024 with a sunny outlook, but the world has seemed hell-bent on tearing itself apart at a faster rate than usual. As such, my mind wandered back to this forgotten anti-capitalist thriller. It’s not enough but I offer prayers for peace. There are many fires that need to be … Read more
The Unloved series has always been a pivotal part of RogerEbert.com, and not just for how it gives Scout’s taste the platform it deserves. But because in the middle of watching a video essay about a critical assessment you may or may not share in your guts, a sentiment is clear: Watch more movies. There’s always going to be more to … Read more
When I got to Boston in the winter of 2008 for schooling, I knew almost no one. I had family that I roomed with for a semester and took it as my burden that by living an hour’s train ride away, it wouldn’t be feasible or realistic to try and do much in the city, and … Read more
The 119th Unloved is on a bonafide forgotten gem. “Our Mother’s House” is the kind of movie that only a small number of initiated viewers have heard of, let alone seen, but everyone who has will be shaken by it for the rest of their lives. Next month marks the tenth anniversary of this little video essay … Read more
Though global climate change has sucked some of the fun out of autumn by messing with its timeline, I’m still getting ready to ring in the spookiest season with this new fall cult classic, a great and underappreciated zombie comedy from the great Jim Jarmusch. As is thematically appropriate, “The Dead Don’t Die” is very much a movie from … Read more
“A Hen in the Wind” was an Ozu movie that I hadn’t even heard of before I sat down with my dear friends Ben and Kat Sachs and Jake Mulligan at the Harvard Film Archive, a theater I’ve been lucky enough to visit since I first arrived in Cambridge for school in 2008. Seeing Ozu on … Read more
Molly Haskell wrote of the 1978 Claudia Weill movie “Girlfriends,” one of my favorite films of all time: “We’re currently living in a time that, at least by comparison, seems like a golden age of gal-pal movies and TV, but we should remember just how much rarer such cultural products once were. Before ‘Thelma & … Read more