Great Movies
Festivals & Awards
Cannes Film Festival Preview 2022
A preview of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, which includes new films by David Cronenberg, Claire Denis, Kelly Reichardt, Park Chan-wook, and many more.
A preview of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, which includes new films by David Cronenberg, Claire Denis, Kelly Reichardt, Park Chan-wook, and many more.
The Rendez-Vous with French Cinema runs from March 3-13 at New York's Walter Reade theater.
Ben Kenigsberg reviews Memoria, the first feature in six years from the Palme d'Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul, along with Jacques Audiard's Paris, 13th District and Ildiko Enyedi's The Story of My Wife.
A dispatch from the New York Film Festival on the latest from Arnaud Desplechin, Justine Triet, Lou Ye, and Martin Scorsese.
Two more premieres from Cannes - new films from Marco Bellocchio & Arnaud Desplechin.
61 films from all 28 EU nations will screen this month at the Chicago European Union Film Festival.
A report on the opening day press conference for Cannes 2017 and the premieres of "Ismael's Ghosts" and "Loveless."
A video preview of this year's Cannes Film Festival!
Matt writes: Last month's 19th installment of Ebertfest in Champaign, Illinois, was a tremendous joy from beginning to end. Our special guests included Norman Lear ("All in the Family"), Isabelle Huppert ("Elle"), Charles Burnett ("Killer of Sheep"), Gary Ross ("Pleasantville"), cinematographer Caleb Deschanel ("Being There"), first assistant director Michael Hausman ("Hair") and Oscar-winning producer Irwin Winkler ("Rocky"). We have compiled our site's complete coverage of the festival into a table of contents, accompanied by several excellent articles from Champaign's newspaper, The News-Gazette. Our special edition of Thumbnails features additional coverage of the festival published at Variety, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Daily Illini, Smile Politely and more. So grab some popcorn and join us in reliving the highlights of Ebertfest 2017.
An interview with author Pascal Mérigeau, whose latest work celebrates the life of filmmaker Jean Renoir.
A review of Woody Allen's new film, which just premiered at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.
Lists from our critics and contributors on the best of 2014.
The 2014 Cannes Film Festival continues with reports on the Dardennes' "Two Days, One Night" and Zhang Yimou's "Coming Home."
Marie writes: Now this is really neat. It made TIME's top 25 best blogs for 2012 and with good reason. Behold artist and photographer Gustaf Mantel's Tumblr blog "If we don't, remember me" - a collection of animated GIFs based on classic films. Only part of the image moves and in a single loop; they're sometimes called cinemagraphs. The results can be surprisingly moving. They also can't be embedded so you have to watch them on his blog. I already picked my favorite. :-)
After duds "Jimmy P." and "Grand Central," the Coen brothers' "Inside Llewyn Davis" saves the day for Barbara Scharres.
A horror or science-fiction movie without subtext is like Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory without electricity. The inner metaphor is what gives it life and resonance. Otherwise, it's just a story about stitched-together people parts. Or take David Cronenberg's "The Fly," a riveting, poignant horror/science-fiction/romance about an ambitious scientist who accidentally gets his DNA mixed up with that of a housefly. Everything about the movie is first-rate, from the direction to the performances to the effects. But what really grabs hold of you is the universal theme: We are all Brundlefly, sentient, self-aware beings whose bodies are going to decay and die. In 1986, a lot of people assumed the subtext was AIDS; Cronenberg later said he was thinking in more general terms about the process of aging. It doesn't matter. The movie works on those levels.
Cronenberg is particularly ingenious at making the word flesh, and the ways he develops his ideas are often even scarier than the explicit horrors: "The Brood" is a masterpiece about the psychosomatic effects of rage turned inward, and about the legacy of emotional abuse passed down from one generation to the next; "Videodrome" is about technology as an extension of the body and the brain; "Dead Ringers" is about mutant forms of psychological and sexual intimacy; "Naked Lunch" is about a writer who has to internalize his own sexuality before he can create art.... Cronenberg is an organic, visionary thinker, storyteller, filmmaker. His movies have meat on their bones. Other filmmakers whose work strikes me as insubstantial lack this ability to flesh-out their pictures with compelling, animating ideas. Their plots are meticulously plotted, but they're skin-deep and there's nothing to sink your imaginative teeth into.
Which brings me to this summer's hits, "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" and "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," neither of which I have much interest in seeing. Instead I'm intrigued by a few things I've read about them -- specifically about their subtext, or lack thereof. In a piece about the racial themes of "The Help" ("Why Can't Critics Just Get Along?"), David Poland writes:
Ever since David Thomson's "A Biographical Dictionary of Film" was published in 1975, browsers have said that they love to hate Thomson's contrarian arguments -- against John Ford or Frank Capra, Coppola or Kubrick, for example.¹ Fans and critics can cite favorite passages of resonant beauty, mystifyingly vague and dismissive summary judgements, and entire entries in which the man appears to have gone off his rocker. And that's the fun of it.
To be fair, Thomson broke faith with (or has been suffering a crisis of faith in) American movies at least far back as "Overexposures: The Crisis in American Filmmaking" (1981), and he's been writing about his crisis ever since. To put it in a sentence that could serve as the ending of one of his entries: I am willing to believe that he loves (or once loved) movies even if he doesn't like them very much. (Wait -- how does he conclude the Katharine Hepburn piece? "She loved movies, while disapproving of them.")
When I encountered the first edition of this book, the year I entered college, I immediately fell in love with it because it was not a standard reference. It was personal, cranky, eloquent, pretentious, pithy, petty, ambitious... It was, as I think Thomson himself suggested in the foreword to the first or second edition (this is the fifth), more accurately titled "An Autobiographical Dictionary of Film." Many times over the years I have implored my employers or partners to license digital rights to Thomson's book so that it could augment and be integrated with other movie databases and references (at Cinemania, FilmPix, Reel.com, RogerEbert.com)... but we've never done it. What, they would ask, is the "value-add"? (Really. Some people used to talk that way.) As a reference, its coverage is too spotty (Ephraim Katz's Film Encyclopedia is much more comprehensive but also has loads of incomplete filmographies), as criticism it's wildly idiosyncratic (nothing wrong with that) and as biography it's whimsically selective and uneven, leaving as many holes as it fills.
The volcano gods were in a snit on Monday, and I arrived in Cannes on Tuesday six hours later than planned, following some frustrating encounters with ticket agents in Frankfurt Airport. Chicago Tribune critic Michael Phillips was on my flight from Chicago, having had his entire original reservation canceled due to drifting volcano ash. I heard delay stories everywhere, and figured I got off easy.
After fast dash to the Palais des Festivals five minutes before the office that issues accreditation badges closed, I picked up my press badge and film market badge. The Cannes skies were dark and threatening, with fog hanging over the distant mountains. I hoped that this wasn't a sign of weather gloom to come.
