TORONTO – Is the Toronto Film Festival the most important in the world, or does it only seem that way? In recent years I’ve described it as second only to Cannes. Now the Toronto critic Liam Lacey says flatly: “Toronto…
TELLURIDE, Colo. -- Like the rains after a dusty season, the movies of September wash and refresh. You walk out of a screening here and think you have surely seen an Oscar nominee. You leave a second and third, and…
TELLURIDE, Colo. – It is the longest career in the history of show businesses. Mickey Rooney first appeared on stage when he was 17 months old. He made his first movie in 1925, when he was five, and on Friday…
Q. Rob Schneider is one of the biggest actors in what I call the Stupid Movie Genre, and I never pay money to see these films in the theater or to rent them. These films do cater to the lowest…
TELLURIDE, Colo. – Oscar season opens every September with the Telluride and Toronto film festivals, and again this year, biopics seem to be leading the field. Last year in September we got our first looks at “Ray,” “Hotel Rwanda” and…
TELLURIDE, Colo. – When I first came to the Telluride Film Festival in 1980, screenings were held in Quonset huts and city parks, the old Nugget theater on Main Street, and in the faded glory of the tiny Sheridan Opera…
This is a lightly-edited transcript of an onstage conversation between Werner Herzog and Roger Ebert after the April 2004 screening of Herzog’s “Invincible” at Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The film involves the story…
When I moved to Chicago in 1966, the Loop was the center of moviegoing in Chicago, and all the big first-run movies opened downtown before going “outlying” two or three weeks later. Today, there is exactly one movie theater in…
Q. Did you really need to pick on Rob Schneider in your review of "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo"? RottenTomatoes.com shows that he scores a 10 out of 100 on the TomatoMeter, which is even lower than Steven Seagal. Why not…
Roger Ebert’s review of the horror film “Chaos,” and the subsequent exchange of “open letters” between the film’s makers and Ebert, inspired an unusual number of impassioned and thoughtful responses from readers. (One of them, an account of a Los…
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