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Some people are members of “Saturday Night Live’s” Five-Timers Club. Some people have won two Best Actress Oscars. And some people are part of one of the most talked-about series of 2023. But no one is all of those people—unless Emma Stone wins the Academy Award on March 10th.  There’s no guarantee Stone will emerge…

Ebert Fest will be 25 Years Old!!! I am absolutely overjoyed to follow Variety’s announcement that our Roger Ebert’s Film Festival “Ebertfest” will be celebrating its 25th Anniversary this year! It is incredible to think that the film festival Roger and I co-founded in 1999 in conjunction with the College of Media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is still…

I was delighted to attend the event at the Music Box in Chicago this week promoting the new book, Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema, by our former Film Critic Odie Henderson, who is now the head critic at The Boston Globe. Odie is one of the people who never fails to make me laugh out loud at…

Not all mediums work the same way. Say what you will about the overall quality, Guy Ritchie’s best work has a rhythm that fits film, whether it’s the zippy pace of something like “Snatch” or the gut punch of his underrated “Wrath of Man.” From the minute I heard that his “The Gentlemen” was going to…

I can’t wait to watch both parts of Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” on the biggest theater screen I can find. I would imagine they’d fit together as perfectly as the first two “Godfather” movies, which they evoke not just in their sepia portraits of corruption, power trips, and generational succession but in their 19th century potboiler-novel attitude toward the…