A new biography of Nora Ephron shows us the real-life events that were reflected in When Harry Met Sally…, Sleepless in Seattle, Hanging Up, and Heartburn and the private moments she kept secret, including her final illness.
A preview of the 2021 Nashville Film Festival, featuring reviews of "Invisible," "Hard Luck Love Song," "Porcupine," "The First Step," "Clara Sola" and "The Humans."
A celebration of Jane Campion's "In the Cut," as part of a video essay series about maligned masterpieces.
Where does a woman’s artistic integrity and autonomy begin and end when it comes to nudity on-screen?
Rosanna Arquette’s 2002 documentary “Searching for Debra Winger” is so much more salient now in light of the recent reckoning, if a little more difficult to watch.
Jessica Ritchey answers the Movie Love Questionnaire.
A recap of the screenings and events at the 2015 Middleburg Film Festival.
Scout Tafoya's series on overlooked or under appreciated films continues with screenwriter John Patrick Shanley's debut feature.
For serious cinema fans, romantic comedy have become dirty words in the post-Meg Ryan era. That's what makes the films of Seattle-based indie writer-director Lynn Shelton so refreshing: They're romantic and comedic without ever being formulaic.
Something nice happened to us while we were preparing the schedule for Ebertfest 2012, which plays April 25-29 at the Virginia Theater (above) in Champaign-Urbana, Ill. We'd invited Patton Oswalt to attend with his "Big Fan. He agreed and went one additional step: "I'd like to personally choose a film to show to the students, and discuss it."
APRIL 25, 2008--Every year I keep meaning to include "Joe vs. the Volcano" in Ebertfest, and every year something else squeezes it out, some film more urgently requiring our immediate attention, you see. The 1990 John Patrick Shanley film, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, was about a wage slave in a factory where dark clouds lower o'er the sky; he is told he has a Brain Cloud, with only five months to live. How this leaves him to become a candidate for human sacrifice in the South Seas follows a long and winding road, in a film that was a failure in every possible way except that I loved it.
"Forgetting Sarah Marshall": Kristen Bell and Russell Brand. P to the V.
Excerpt from an Apatowian appreciation I wrote for MSN Movies, covering "Freaks & Geeks" to "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" to "Knocked Up" and "Superbad" and "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" (with the inconspicuous omission of "Drillbit Taylor"): Writer/director/producer Judd Apatow, the man Entertainment Weekly recently crowned the 'Smartest Person in Hollywood,' has made a solemn promise to put a penis -- at least one penis -- into every movie he makes from now on. He's slipped penises into his pictures before, of course: all those obsessive-compulsive drawings in "Superbad," his own on comically disconcerting display in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story," and Jason Segel's for a humiliating breakup in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall." Sometimes, too, his films include breasts and vaginas. And there are perfectly good reasons for that. Not the least of which is that all genitalia and externally visible glands are funny.
CANNES, France--In a stunning surprise, Gus Van Sant's "Elephant," a low-budget independent film inspired by the Columbine shootings, won both the Palme d'Or and the best director award here Sunday at the 56th Cannes Film Festival.
Walter Matthau, who claimed that "Foghorn" was his middle name, is dead at 79. The beloved actor, whose face was mapped with laugh lines, died of a heart attack early Saturday morning. He was brought into a Santa Monica hospital in cardiac arrest, and pronounced dead at 1:41 a.m. PDT.
`I have this terminal condition called bitchiness, right?" Linda Fiorentino smiled, and tossed her hair back from her forehead. Straight, black hair, framing dark eyes that level with you. Just the way she looked in "The Last Seduction," and just the way she looks in "Jade."
Q. I do some computer programming on the side and I have learned much about the machine's capabilities. Seems that it might be possible one day to produce a movie completely by computer without the need for actors, props, sets, or human music. Would the public accept this? How about yourself? I doubt if I would like a Clint Eastwood movie with no Eastwood--just computer art and sound. How far should Hollywood go? Could everything become like that Holodeck on the new Star Trek? (Mike Jordan, Snow Camp, N.C.)
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