Star Trek Into Darkness
Less a classic "Star Trek" adventure than a Star Trek-flavored action flick, shot in the frenzied, handheld, cut-cut-cut style that’s become Hollywood’s norm, director J.J.…
Less a classic "Star Trek" adventure than a Star Trek-flavored action flick, shot in the frenzied, handheld, cut-cut-cut style that’s become Hollywood’s norm, director J.J.…
Families create their own narratives. Stories are passed on from generation to generation, and in this way the past continues to live, but it can…
"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens…
Patrice Leconte's "Monsieur Hire" is a tragedy about loneliness and erotomania, told about two solitary people who have nothing else in common. It involves a…
At Cannes, the Coen brothers discuss their inspirations for "Inside Llewyn Davis."
Billy Wilder's under-appreciated 1978 "Fedora" returns to Cannes to remind us that some things, like the fear of aging among celebrities, never change.
Roger was a titan in the film community, but he was also a beacon for the seriously disabled.
Mother’s Day I awakened to spirited calls from my children and grandchildren. As Roger wrote in his memoir, “Life Itself,” I came from a large family of nine, and I had four brothers and four…
Roger was a titan in the film community, but he was also a beacon for the seriously disabled.
Ray Harryhausen told us, time and again, the story of how he saw the original "King Kong" (1933) on the big screen when he was…
Dear Roger,You emailed me the questions to this interview on March 15, 2013. In your March 16th reply to my email, you said: The piece…
Tilda Swinton leads 1,500 people in a dance-along to Barry White's "You're the First, the Last, My Everything" during Roger Ebert's Film Festival in the…
The place for everything that doesn't have a home elsewhere on RogerEbert.com, this is a collection of thoughts, ideas, snippets, and other fun things that Roger and others posted over the years.
I posted the Beethoven video not long ago and it inspired enthusiastic comments, many of them coming down to: Who is this kid?
Under another video online I found a comment, possibly by his mother, saying Jonathan started trying to conduct before he could walk, and is now receiving violin lessons from a teacher he really likes.
There are more videos online, but embedding has been disabled. Of Jonathan conducting the 4th movement of Beethoven's 5th, I found this comment on a blog named Murphies:
This is the same symphony that Forster wrote about in "Howard's End" in what some of you already know is my favorite piece of writing about music anywhere. I think Forster and Jonathan would understand one another perfectly. Here's what Forster had to say about the segment Jonathan is conducting: "The goblins really had been there. They might return--and they did. It was as if the splendour of life might boil over and waste to steam and froth. In its dissolution one heard the terrible, ominous note, and a goblin, with increased malignity, walked quietly over the universe from end to end. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall. Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. He built the ramparts up. He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were scattered. He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things."
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At Cannes, the Coen brothers discuss their inspirations for "Inside Llewyn Davis."
Roger was a titan in the film community, but he was also a beacon for the seriously disabled.
Billy Wilder's under-appreciated 1978 "Fedora" returns to Cannes to remind us that some things, like the fear of agin...
While Cannes's red-carpet crowd toasts the Coen brothers' tuneful "Inside Llewyn Davis," the parallel programs have a...