Everyone from Shakespeare to Martin Luther to Pier Paolo Pasolini has taken a crack at retelling one or more tales from Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. First published in 1353, the short story collection follows 10 noblemen and women as they flee Black Death-ridden Florence for a secluded villa in Fiesole. Over the course of a fortnight, the guests take turns telling stories, resulting in 100 tales, ranging from erotica, tragedy, comedy, and beyond. But just in case the viewer is led astray by the title, Netflix’s new limited series borrows only the title of Boccaccio’s book, and instead ..read more

At the Art House Convergence’s recent independent film exhibition conference held in Chicago, Josh Frank, author and urban drive-in entrepreneur, announced his radical initiative for luring people back into theaters: Silent movies. Hold on, hold on, hear him out. “Silents Synced,” scheduled to launch nationally Oct. 4, will present classic silent films synced to seminal albums and songs by iconic alternative rock bands of the late 1980s and ‘90s. First up is F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” paired with Radiohead’s albums “Kid A” and “Amnesiac.” The second release will be Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock, J ..read more

Wonder what movies we’ll be talking about during this upcoming Oscar season? A handy cheat-sheet every year is the lineup of the Venice Film Festival, which starts August 28 and is the first of several high-profile fall festivals. Even the 2023 edition, which was hampered by a lack of stars due to the then-ongoing actors’ strike, debuted the likes of “Poor Things,” “Ferrari,” “Evil Does Not Exist” and “Green Border.” But now that the actors and writers have gotten new contracts, this year’s Venice will be filled with plenty of buzzy premieres. But which films, sight unseen, look the most intr ..read more

The two-hander is an elegant structure for a lower-budget effort: Just plop two characters together, often in a single location, and let the actors' performances and the innate tension of the scenario play itself out. It's a very genre-flexible conceit, malleable enough to fit everything from murderous chamber piece to yakuza thriller to pitch-black tragicomedies starring middle-aged Michiganders. In that spirit, three films I've seen at this year's Fantasia International Film Festival manage to use their reduced cast and focus on pairings to intriguing effect, even if not all of them co ..read more

“Deadpool & Wolverine” exists because Hugh Jackman, who has played Wolverine nine times and had supposedly retired the character after 2017’s “Logan,” loved the Deadpool series and was friends with star Ryan Reynolds. He wanted the mutant with the adamantium claws to team up with the Merc with the Mouth, preferably in a buddy movie modeled partly on R-rated 1980s action flicks like “48 Hrs.” The end product is true to the spirit of the franchise while pushing its self-aware humor and fourth wall-breaks until it all seems like the result of a dare: how big can we make the air quotes around ..read more

Let's get this out of the way, first and foremost: I'll probably never love a festival more than Montreal's Fantasia International Film Festival. It's long (runs at least two weeks), genre-focused (horror, sci-fi, animation, you name it), and eclectic as all get-out. On top of that, it's exceedingly Canadian. So it was a delight to learn that, for my first year as an Assistant Editor for RogerEbert.com, I'd get to do more than pilfer Fantasia's ever-generous screener library remotely this year - I would fly up to sunny Montreal, Quebec, and join the festivities. The fest, which opened on ..read more

Few people have kind things to say about “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.” Receiving terrible reviews when it was released in May 2009, the film was meant to extend the X-Men cinematic universe in a unique way, giving Hugh Jackman’s mutant antihero Logan his own standalone film after being one of the main attractions in “X-Men,” “X2: X-Men United” and “X-Men: The Last Stand,” which at that point was one of Hollywood’s most lucrative franchises. So, 20th Century Fox figured, why not keep the gravy train rolling? Let’s make a movie where audiences get to see how Logan became Wolverine. Surely that wo ..read more

Set at a conference for “thought leaders,” “The Way We Speak” is an ambitious drama that puts its cameras on a handful of characters wading into an arena of intellectual combat while dealing with emotional, psychological and in some cases physical challenges that threaten to unravel them. The performances are uniformly excellent. That all the key players (save for the lead) are not yet in-demand names is even more impressive. They carry themselves like stars (or endlessly reliable character actors) even if we don’t know them. Faith versus Reason is the main attraction: a middle-aged writ ..read more

Before we get too deep into the story of Lou Pearlman, a pop music kingmaker who built his empire on a Ponzi Scheme, something needs to be addressed about Netflix’s three-part docuseries “Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam.” As technology advances, there are going to be deeper and deeper questions about what’s allowed in non-fiction filmmaking, and the creators of this series wade into what I would call some professionally murky waters. Pearlman himself died in 2016, but he published an autobiography titled Band, Brands, & Billions and the series uses passages from that book but puts them into ..read more

Looking back at their last collaboration, 2019's bloody cult horror hit "Come to Daddy," you'd be surprised to see New Zealand writer-director Ant Timpson and actor-producer Elijah Wood turn their attention to a charming family-adventure flick. But "Bookworm," which just premiered as the opening night of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, still carries that signature Timpson DNA: The aching pathos of fragmented parental dynamics, a deep debt to the genre films of the 1970s, and surprising twists and turns that pivot a seemingly simple story down wild new routes.  Fr ..read more