
Richard Jewell
Eastwood’s conceptions of heroism and villainy have always been, if not endlessly complex, at least never simplistic.
Eastwood’s conceptions of heroism and villainy have always been, if not endlessly complex, at least never simplistic.
It becomes repetitive, nonsensical, and just loud after everyone gets an origin story and we're left with nothing to do but go boom.
Roger Ebert on James Ivory's "Howards End".
"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…
An article about today's noon premiere of a new movie about architect Benjamin Marshall at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
An article about the screening of Horace Jenkins' "Cane River" on Friday, November 1st, at the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles.
Scout Tafoya's video essay series about maligned masterpieces celebrates Steven Soderbergh's Solaris.
An article about today's noon premiere of a new movie about architect Benjamin Marshall at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
An FFC on Gavin Hood's Official Secrets.
A celebration of Yasujiro Ozu, as written by a Far Flung Correspondent from Egypt.
The latest on Blu-ray and DVD, including Hustlers, Ready or Not, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and a Criterion edition of Until the End…
I have come to appreciate silence not as a sign of weakness or capitulation, but as a finely sharpened dagger that finds its way to…
Roger Ebert became film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times in 1967. He is the only film critic with a star on Hollywood Walk of Fame and was named honorary life member of the Directors' Guild of America. He won the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Screenwriters' Guild, and honorary degrees from the American Film Institute and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
When the lights go down at the beginning of "Gremlins 2: The New Batch," the first sights and sounds are unmistakable: We're looking at a Looney Tunes cartoon, starring Bugs Bunny. But then a controversy breaks out, as Daffy Duck charges into the cartoon and demands equal billing after decades of playing second fiddle to the Wascally Wabbit.
Eventually Daffy says the heck with it--if he can't star in the cartoon, then let the feature begin. And it does. But the movie's fake-cartoon opening left me with a desire for more. I wished there had been a standard-length cartoon before "Gremlins II," just as there always used to be at the movies. The good news is, the summer of 1991 may see a return of that old tradition.
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Touchstone has made a new Roger Rabbit and Baby Huey cartoon, "Roller Coaster Rabbit," to play before "Dick Tracy." The cartoon was inspired by the popularity of the Roger Rabbit cartoon that preceeded last summer's Touchstone release, "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids." Not incidentially, Touchstone home video executives believe the inclusion of the cartoon on VHS and laserdisk copies of "Honey..." helped boost the movie's healthy homevid sales.
The AMC national movie chain is going even further, however, and plans to show a cartoon before all of the feature attractions on all 1,300 of its screens. The experiment will last a year, a chain spokesman said.
This can only be a good thing for the movies. The cartoon is an important part of that mysterious process by which a group of strangers become an audience, and settles down to have a film experience together. And the best cartoons exhibit an irreverant, wiseguy, satirical point of view that a lot of today's "high concept" features could benefit from.
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