In the fall of 1981, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel fell in love with two men named Andre and Wally, and they told the world about it, thereby saving a tiny, eccentric, beguiling movie from a fast fade into commercial oblivion. I went to that movie, as did a few hundred thousand or more other people, because of that love. 

At the time their show went by the handle “Sneak Previews,” soon to be renamed “At the Movies” when the PBS success moved to a national syndication deal at Tribune Entertainment and then to Buena Vista Entertainment, aka Disney/ABC. The film about Andre and Wally, director Louis Malle’s “My Dinner with Andre,” made for perfect undergrad viewing, at least my undergrad viewing. Big ideas, elaborate anecdotes, two friends in real life: The struggling playwright and performer Wallace Shawn and the adventurous, restless experimental theater guru Andre Gregory, sharing a meal and a few insights. The movie feels like a play you’re watching from the next table, or from an ever-present waiter’s proximity.

When “My Dinner with Andre” opened, it was barely there. In Opposable Thumbs, Matt Singer’s book on the enterprising enterprise known as Siskel & Ebert, Shawn recalls the film eking out an unpromising handful of screenings at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York City, before the film’s distributor started running miniscule ads saying, in effect, “closing soon in a theater near you, if it happens to be playing in a theater near you.” 

And then Roger and Gene’s “Sneak Previews” episode aired on a Thursday. The sellouts began, and “instead of closing,” as Singer writes, the film “stayed at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema for a year straight, and it wound up playing in more than nine hundred theaters all over the United States.” It cost a little under $500,000 to make it. It grossed roughly ten times that. 

I saw it at the Cedar Theater on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus, the same theater where I caught a midnight showing of “Eraserhead” as a freshman and never fully recovered. “My Dinner with Andre” was verbose in an easy-listening way, and exactly the sort of movie I wanted at that age, when I was discovering the joys of what the U of M theater majors (I was just a hanger-on) called “the pointless second dinner after rehearsal,” an excuse for hours of rudderless, ridiculous, eddying late-night conversation.

This is what Roger and Gene were about, in miniature, and without the “ridiculous” part, some of their sweaters aside. Before I read either of them, I listened and watched them converse, and debate, sometimes pissily, yes, more often thoughtfully, always engagingly. I saw “My Dinner with Andre” because it had champions in Roger and Gene, and my first film critic crush, Pauline Kael, whose essay “Trash, Art and the Movies” was excerpted in my seventh-grade textbook, Coping with the Mass Media. In its “Sneak Previews” era, the show was so, so simple and so right, one of those unassuming comets that comes around every 76 years or so. What they said, and how they said it, mattered to so many. 

The summer before “Sneak Previews” saved “My Dinner with Andre” from flopdom, I worked a part-time janitorial job at a machine parts factory in northeast Minneapolis. The guys in the shop talked about movies a lot. “Took my kid to see “Cannonball Run,” the friendliest of the guys told me over break. “Just, you know, stupid. But fun. And that Adrienne Barbeau. I mean! Cripes. Wouldn’t kick her outta bed. I watched ‘Maude” every week because of her, and I HATED ‘Maude.’ I kinda liked ‘Cannonball Run.’ (pause) (laughing) And Roger and Gene HATED that one!” 

My factory cohort watched “Sneak Previews” every week. He saw his first subtitled film because Roger and Gene recommended it. I wish I knew which film it was, but whatever it was, he took a chance on it based on loyalty to “my guys,” as he called Roger and Gene. Based on where most of the populist imports were coming from at the time, my coworker may have taken that chance because the film was either French or Italian, and one of the female leads may have resembled Adrienne Barbeau. But the nudge came from a couple of film critics.

This sort of thing happened a lot along the years of their TV run, the 50th anniversary of which Chicago celebrates this year. 

I never knew Gene; I knew Roger, and, through Roger, I have a valiant, good friend in Chaz Ebert. When Roger got sick, somehow, improbably, there I was, in 2006, in the Ebert chair (gulp) opposite longtime co-host Richard Roeper, trying to say something quick and interesting before wait the segment’s over already well better luck next segment. That somehow improbably turned into a steady rotation with A.O. Scott of The New York Times opposite Richard, and then Richard and me for a time before Richard left, and Tony and I ran out the syndication contract for the show’s final year. 

When I was floundering, which was early and often, Roger more or less saved my ass with a couple of very simple tips:

One: Figure out the ONE THING you NEED to say about whatever you’re reviewing in the time you have on camera. Maybe two things. But really, one. Don’t try to cover the waterfront. You will drown.

Two: There are ways to interrupt or, more politely, interject, without speaking. Whatever physical thing you tend to do in real life when you hear somebody say something worth an argument—shaking your head or doing some “waaaaait a minute” thing with your hands—just do that, but bigger than you’d do it in actual life. Do that thing, and the camera will cut to YOU. And then you talk, quickly. 

“Time is short,” Roger told me. He was referring to the segment’s unscripted cross-talk, which made the show the show. Now that he and Gene have been gone a long time, even though they’re with us still, I realize he may have been talking about something larger than effective on-camera debate tactics. 

As Chicago marks the 50th anniversary of these two, let’s also remember why we watched, listened to, and read them in the first place. The thumbs weren’t the thing, really. What I remember about Roger and Gene talking up “My Dinner with Andre” was the excitement of discovery.

At their best, like Andre and Wally with a different, itchier sort of friendship underneath the double act, Gene and Roger made the connections and started new conversations (or arguments) about movies we’d seen–and the ones we’d be seeing that weekend, thanks to them.

Fantastic Fest is an interesting combination of known quantities and unexpected discoveries. Everyone has an idea what something like “Black Phone 2” or even “Primate” is before they use their pass to score a ticket for it, but a lot of the schedule also consists of premieres that can feel more like throwing a dart at a schedule. Maybe this will be good? To varying degrees, all three in this dispatch are.

“Colors” meets “Sinners” in Ryan Prows’ intense “Night Patrol,” one of the most buzzed Fantastic Fest premieres of 2025, like it or not. Love it or hate it, and I heard from people in both camps, this brutal genre flick had people here talking about it, and that’s sometimes all that really matters when your audience is seeing five movies a day. You want to stand out. It’s an audacious genre film, a movie with a great pitch: What if the corrupt cops of an LAPD task force were actual vampires, sucking off the blood of the community they’ve sworn an oath to protect?

The director of “Lowlife” launches his film out of a cannon in the opening scenes as we meet Wazi (RJ Cyler) and his girlfriend sharing a moment in the middle of the L.A. night. Police officers approach the vehicle, demand that she gets out of the car, and then one whose clearly in charge (played by wrestler C.M. Punk) instructs the new guy named Hawkins (Justin Long) to shoot her in the head. He complies, setting a dark tone for a film that is willing to go there in terms of violence, language, and racial commentary.

The next day we learn that Hawkins is partners with one of the LAPD that may be a rare good apple named Carr (Jermaine Fowler), who, of course, is the now-on-the-run Wazi’s brother. Their mother (Nicki Micheaux) still lives in a place called the Courts, preaching the values of her ancestors as protection, using Zulu imagery and practices to help her people. She hands out pamphlets to gang members, and places African totems on the fences around her house. It turns out they will come in handy.

After his initiation into “Night Patrol,” Hawkins discovers the truth about the elite squad, and a secret about his family relation to the group. He also undergoes a pretty gnarly, bloody transformation. Prows digs right into some fun practical effects and gallons of the fake red stuff, and Long is truly up for the challenge. You know those sequences in movies when the ordinary guy becomes a bloodsucker for the first time? The shaking, the terror, the transforming, etc.? Long is basically forced into one of those for half the run time here, and he gives a physically daring performance that’s unlike what is usually asked of him. He’s great. Almost everyone is good in “Night Patrol”—the “Master” of the group who I won’t spoil feels a bit miscast to me—but it belongs to Long.

Prows has a lot of ideas that he’s willing to fearlessly deploy, but the movie gets a little messy in the final act, as chaos descends on the Courts, and we lose a sense of geography and continuity. It becomes hard to tell who’s going where, who’s still alive, and who’s found safety. At one point, some key characters seem to be running out only to end up on a couch again. And then the final scenes are even clunkier. And while “Sinners” is a tough bar to reach, it does feel like “Night Patrol” raises some ideas about race and law enforcement without as much to say about white culture literally sucking the blood of minorities and their cultures as Coogler’s masterpiece.

Still, this is an original, ambitious piece of work that IFC should be able to turn into a buzz generator to start 2026.

A film that started to make that buzzy noise in Austin in the days before its premiere is Rod Blackhurst’s demented “Dolly,” which is basically an homage to Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” complete with a Leatherface-esque monster, twisted family, and grainy film stock. Co-writer/director Blackhurst is clever enough to literally place a signpost early in the film to make it clear that he knows you’re starting to suspect the Hooper connections, and you’re not wrong.

Chase (Seann William Scott) and Rachel (an excellent Kate Cobb) are taking a hike to a scenic overlook, where Chase is going to propose to his longtime girlfriend (although we know she’s not sure she’s going to say yes). On the trail to the view, they find some creepy dolls, most broken, some nailed to trees. That they don’t immediately run back to their car is a bit of a movie contrivance, but that’s the contract viewers sign with a movie called “Dolly.”

It’s not long before Chase and Rachel meet the title character, a hulking beast played by a wrestler named Max the Impaler with a bloody dress and a doll mask on its face. Only making breathing and squeaky, sorta-baby noises, Dolly is nightmare fuel, especially after she captures Rachel, and tries to make the poor woman her new “daughter.” This means a crib, diaper change, and, yes, feeding. “Dolly” flirts with what was once called torture porn as Rachel’s plight gets more and more disturbing, but Blackhurst knows just how long to carry out his grossest ideas before giving viewers a break.

His vision is twisted but also sometimes funny in its ridiculousness, making for a film that’s well-balanced tonally, even if it feels a little slight on plotting. I get the sense that Blackhurst and his team would like to turn this character into a franchise and if this relatively self-contained, small-cast version is just the introduction for the bigger and better adventures of Dolly, it’s a memorable one.

Finally, there’s Diana Mills Smith’s “Dinner to Die For,” which played as a part of the low-budget Burnt Ends program at Fantastic Fest. It’s a single-setting, cheaply-made piece of thriller filmmaking that feels a bit like a short that’s been barely stretched out to feature (and it’s only 75 minutes), but Smith has ability that’s worth keeping an eye on. She knows how to keep a three-character piece moving, even if I wanted another unexpected course or two on this fixed menu.

Shamilla Miller is solid as the intriguing Hannah, a chef who has been forced into the relatively unsatisfying work of food photography. You know the fancy shots that accompany overpriced cookbooks, which she wishes she could write herself. Her friend Evan (Steven John Ward) keeps coming over to try her cuisine and watch true crime episodes with her, clearly putting in the time because he hopes to escape the friend zone. When a new neighbor named Blaire (Nina Erasmus) catches Hannah’s eye, Hannah starts an unexpected role play with Evan, suggesting that she could invite Blaire over for a bit of dinner and a bit of murder. Is she just playfully incorporating their true crime obsession into flirtatious banter? That’s what Evan presumes at first, and he plays along, until he starts to worry.

“Dinner to Die For” probably should have been a short or given a bit more meat to fill out to a feature. It’s a film that takes too long to find another gear and then feels kind of like it rushes to its ending just as the stakes are raised, although Smith does get a few fantastic shots in her climax that had the audience at the Fantastic Fest premiere cheering. It matters, especially for films like these, when the last bites are the best ones.