From Jeff Levin, Rochester, NY: I’ve never seen an opening tighter or more ingeniously structured than the one for Philip Kaufman’s "Quills." It’s an opening that flips from dreamy to nightmarish and completely changes the nature of what you think…
A mighty zoom. It begins here... ... and ends here. It's been said that what "The Shining" is to the dolly/Steadicam shot, "Barry Lyndon" is to the zoom. Jeffrey Bernstein offers an in-depth exploration of all those slow, still-life zooms…
Roger Ebert directs the show at the 2006 Overlooked Film Festival. Roger Ebert's wife Chaz sent an update on his recovery for publication on RogerEbert.com. Chaz writes: Roger was making good progress and was ready to go to his next…
View image "The Flaming Spirits of the Evil Counsellors" (illustration for Dante's "Divine Comedy") Gustave Doré (1865) "The Descent" quotes from a whole bunch of movies (and I'll be illustrating some of those soon), but while watching it I was…
Here's an eye-opener... As you may know, "The Descent" (which opened in US theaters this weekend) was released last year in Great Britain, where it is now available on Region 2 PAL DVD. The British release has one final scene…
View image From Edward Bowie, US Army: I have a counter-intuitive nomination for best shot: The opening segue from the Paramount “mountain��? to the unspecified Andean mountain in “Raiders of the lost Ark.��? Indicative, I think, that what we are…
View image: Cal Naughton, Jr. and Ricky Bobby drink beers and talk about peanut butter and ladies. I've got reviews of four new releases on RogerEbert.com this week, and all the movies are actually pretty good (or even better) for…
A cacophonous industrial noise fills the darkness, illuminated by what seems to be some kind of flashing safety light behind a divider of scuffed, semi-opaque plastic strips. They ripple and part and a man appears -- his legs in tattered…
Nicolas Cage in "WTC." I'm still trying to figure out what to make of Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center" (and what kind of movie Stone and Paramount thought they were making), but in the meantime I have an essay looking…
View image Photo by David Bordwell When I met David Bordwell at Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival last spring, he had recently returned from Hong Kong with a cool new Fuji FinePix camera, a model that wasn't available in the…
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