David Tennant Can’t Hold Together Frustrating Deadwater Fell
Roger Ebert Blog
by Brian Tallerico
4y ago
While we don’t cover a lot of Acorn TV here on RogerEbert.com, I’ve always liked what they do, and jumped at the chance to review a new thriller that claimed to be cut from the same cloth as one of the best shows of all time, “Broadchurch.” Sure, there are parallels between “Deadwater Fell,” premiering stateside tonight after a January run in the U.K., but the season is ultimately a frustrating product, a series that doesn’t live up to its potential either in casting or premise. It’s one of those mystery series that plays games with its viewers instead of presenting them with a convincing cas ..read more
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Quibi Launches Today with a Little Bit of Everything
Roger Ebert Blog
by Brian Tallerico
4y ago
I was very skeptical of Quibi, the new app launching today promising hours of new programming cut up into bite-sized chunks built for the iGeneration. Do we really need to be leaning into the decreased attention span of the country or the fact that we’re all addicted to our smartphones with a content provider that relies on both of these things? The concept behind Quibi is simple—episodic programming that runs no longer than nine minutes an episode and is meant to be watched on a phone, either portrait or landscape. In fact, the screeners sent to press offered a view in which we could see the ..read more
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The Door is Always Wide Open: On Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel
Roger Ebert Blog
by Wael Khairy
4y ago
It is not surprising that during these surreal times we live in, I find myself incredibly drawn to the work of Luis Buñuel, father of Surrealist cinema. Almost 60 years after it was originally released, his film “The Exterminating Angel” has never been more relevant. Buñuel's understanding of human behavior is timeless, and we can all learn a thing or two when examining his work with the current pandemic in mind.  The film takes place in the lavish mansion of Señor Edmundo Nobile. He has invited friends over for a fancy dinner party. As the party is about to get started, the servants disappea ..read more
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Day4Empathy 2020: Roger’s Reviews on What We’re Watching During the Pandemic
Roger Ebert Blog
by Brian Tallerico
4y ago
Every year on the anniversary of his passing, we give RogerEbert.com back to Roger Ebert, posting 13 of his reviews on the front page. This year feels a little different for reasons we don’t have to tell you. In light of everything that’s happening in the world, we thought we’d take a slightly different approach and highlight the reviews of Roger’s of films people are talking about during COVID-19. So you’ll find his takes on “Outbreak” and “Contagion” back on the front page today and tomorrow, along with a selection of reviews from our feature on “What to Watch During a Quarantine” and Colli ..read more
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Contagion
Roger Ebert Blog
by Roger Ebert
4y ago
This review originally ran on September 7, 2011 and is being re-published now for Day4Empathy 2020. A black screen. The sound of a harsh cough. We are already alert when, soon after, we see a bartender pick up a customer's coin and then punch numbers into a cash register. Germs, we're thinking. "Contagion" is a realistic, unsensational film about a global epidemic. It's being marketed as a thriller, a frightening speculation about how a new airborne virus could enter the human species and spread relentlessly in very little time. This scenario is already familiar to us through the apparently ..read more
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Outbreak
Roger Ebert Blog
by Roger Ebert
4y ago
This review originally ran on March 10, 1995 and is being re-published now for Day4Empathy 2020. It is one of the great scare stories of our time, the notion that deep in the uncharted rain forests, deadly diseases are lurking, and if they ever escape their jungle homes and enter the human bloodstream, there will be a new plague the likes of which we have never seen. Wolfgang Petersen's "Outbreak" is a clever, daunting thriller about such a possibility. It follows the career of a microscopic bug that kills humans within 24 hours of exposure by liquefying the internal organs. Not a pretty pic ..read more
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The Blues Brothers
Roger Ebert Blog
by Roger Ebert
4y ago
This review originally ran in 1980 and is being re-published now for Day4Empathy 2020. This is some weird movie. There's never been anything that looked quite like it; was it dreamed up in a junkyard? It stars John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as the Blues Brothers, Jake and Elwood, characters who were created on "Saturday Night Live" and took on a fearsome life of their own. The movie tells us something of their backgrounds: They were reared in a sadistic West Side orphanage, learned the blues by osmosis, and, as the movie opens, have teamed up again after Jake's release from the Joliet pen. The ..read more
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War and Peace
Roger Ebert Blog
by Roger Ebert
4y ago
This review originally ran on June 22, 1969 and is being re-published now for Day4Empathy 2020. The movies have done a lot of borrowing during their long climb to the status of an art form, but they've also invented an approach or two. It is impossible to think of gangsters or cowboys without thinking of the movies; and perhaps epics also belong on the list of genres that are uniquely cinematic. No other medium, except literature, is so well suited to the epic form. It would take a film historian to evaluate the dozens -- hundreds? -- of times when Hollywood has marshaled casts of thousands ..read more
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Joe Versus the Volcano
Roger Ebert Blog
by Roger Ebert
4y ago
This review originally ran no March 9, 1990, and is being re-run for Day4Empathy 2020. Gradually during the opening scenes of "Joe Versus the Volcano," my heart began to quicken, until finally I realized a wondrous thing: I had not seen this movie before. Most movies, I have seen before. Most movies, you have seen before. Most movies are constructed out of bits and pieces of other movies, like little engines built from cinematic Erector sets. But not "Joe Versus the Volcano." It is not an entirely successful movie, but it is new and fresh and not shy of taking chances. And the dialogue in it ..read more
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Local Hero
Roger Ebert Blog
by Roger Ebert
4y ago
This review originally ran on April 15, 1983 and is being re-published now for Day4Empathy 2020. Here is a small film to treasure, a loving, funny, understated portrait of a small Scottish town and its encounter with a giant oil company. The town is tucked away in a sparkling little bay, and is so small that everybody is well aware of everybody else's foibles. The oil company is run by an eccentric billionaire (Burt Lancaster) who would really rather have a comet named after him than own all the oil in the world. And what could have been a standard plot about conglomerates and ecology, etc ..read more
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