Having just come off the set of a movie and renewed my appreciation for accidents, deadlines, compromises, and heartbreak, I thought I’d look back at the work of the much-missed Lynn Shelton, one of the finest unsung American romantic directors. Shelton decided, sadly, what turned out to be more than halfway through her life, that

In the wake of five seasons of “For All Mankind“‘s alt-history time-jumping—currently, we’re in an alternate 2012 where we’ve colonized Mars, and a still-alive John Lennon teamed up with Jay-Z to produced “The Grey Album”—it’s easy to forget the show started as a simple 1960s period piece, with a twist: What if the Russians got

As excited as I was for the Cannes films in the Main Competition, I always look forward to the sidebar sections with just as much, if not more, anticipation. “The Chronology of Water,” “My Father’s Shadow,” “Pillion,” and “Urchin” all premiered in Un Certain Regard last year, while Critics’ Week was the home of “A

A tender, sensitively observed first feature from Norway’s Eivind Landsvik, “Low Expectations” makes its home in the same Oslo where Joachim Trier and Dag Johan Haugerud set their quiet, introspective films. There’s a dreamily diffuse quality to the Nordic capital that befits the strain of empathetic naturalism that’s emanated of late from the country’s cinema.

Each night, in a small Nepalese village nestled in a deep forest, the community carries torches between the trees to ward off wild elephants that would otherwise rampage through farmers’ crops. At once a time-honored ritual and a practical responsibility, this custom embodies the complex, often painful collisions between past and present that constitute everyday

“Fjord,” Cristian Mungiu’s drama about a Romanian family that is targeted by child services in Norway, won the Palme d’Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival. It was a second Palme for Mungiu, who took the prize in 2007 for “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days.” The jury president, Park Chan-wook, said he had

The 2026 Cannes Film Festival starts Tuesday, May 12th, running through May 24th. The Ebert team returns this year with coverage of all of the major films in review and video form. In this video dispatch, Scott Dummler interviews correspondent Marya E. Gates about her three favorite films from the festival, and we get a Cannes

The easy shorthand for how to describe Netflix’s “The Boroughs” is that it’s like “Stranger Things” with walkers instead of bicycles, and that’s not just because of the foundational similarities in its plotting. The score, the credits font, and even the creature design all share a bit of that Duffer Brothers flavor, which makes sense

Boots Riley is one of the few American filmmakers who are most visibly invested in conversations about class, capitalism, and aesthetics in their works. He pushes each subject to the point of breaking in absurdist works whose visual ambition and thematic audacity can often feel as knowingly chaotic as our contemporary world. With “Sorry to

The Director’s Fortnight sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival has become a target of debate in recent years, sometimes viewed as “the films that didn’t get into the main Cannes program.” While it may be true for a few films, there’s a lot of quality in DF, not only exemplified by the excellent clip reel