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Awards Tour Link to Awards Tour. Matt Brunson Film Frenzy. Jeff Otto ReelzChannel. Jay Antani Cinema Writer. Fernando F. Croce CinePassion. Starts with artful delusions before dribbling into nothingness Full Review Aug 30, Steven D. Greydanus Decent Films. Karina Montgomery Cinerina. Felix Vasquez Jr. Cinema Crazed. Scott Mendelson rec. After he sent her some of his columns, she told him they were "the best film criticism being done in American newspapers today.
His editor told him he didn't have to explain it, just describe it. He was one of the first critics to champion Arthur Penn 's Bonnie and Clyde , calling it "a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance. It is also pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking and astonishingly beautiful.
If it does not seem that those words should be strung together, perhaps that is because movies do not very often reflect the full range of human life. It had to be set some time. But it was made now and it's about us. I felt an exhilaration beyond describing. I did not suspect how long it would be between such experiences, but at least I learned that they were possible.
Ebert co-wrote the screenplay for Russ Meyer 's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and sometimes joked about being responsible for it. It was poorly received on its release yet has become a cult film. Beginning in , Ebert worked for the University of Chicago as an adjunct lecturer, teaching a night class on film at the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.
In , Ebert received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Siskel and Ebert were sometimes accused of trivializing film criticism. Richard Corliss , in Film Comment , called the show "a sitcom with its own noodling, toodling theme song starring two guys who live in a movie theater and argue all the time". He argued that "good criticism is commonplace these days.
Film Comment itself is healthier and more widely distributed than ever before. Film Quarterly is, too; it even abandoned eons of tradition to increase its page size. In , W. The selections are eclectic, ranging from Louise Brooks 's autobiography to David Thomson 's novel Suspects. He gave his blessing Every other week I have revisited a great movie, and the response has been encouraging.
In May , Siskel took a leave of absence from the show to undergo brain surgery. He returned to the show, although viewers noticed a change in his physical appearance. Despite appearing sluggish and tired, Siskel continued reviewing films with Ebert and would appear on Late Show with David Letterman.
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In February , Siskel died of a brain tumor. Then it seemed like we never stopped. Being a film critic was important to him. He liked to refer to his job as 'the national dream beat,' and say that in reviewing movies he was covering what people hoped for, dreamed about, and feared. You were one of the smartest, funniest, quickest men I've ever known and one of the best reporters I know for sure that seeing a truly great movie made you so happy that you'd tell me a week later your spirits were still high.
It never went anywhere, but we both believed it was a good idea. Maybe the problem was that no one else could possibly understand how meaningless was the hate, how deep was the love. In , Ebert was diagnosed with cancer of the salivary glands. In , cancer surgery resulted in his losing his ability to eat and speak.
In , prior to his Overlooked Film Festival, he posted a picture of his new condition. Not that I ever was. Ebert ended his association with At The Movies in July , [ 45 ] [ 64 ] after Disney indicated it wished to take the program in a new direction. As of , his reviews were syndicated to more than newspapers in the United States and abroad.
His final television series, Ebert Presents: At the Movies , premiered on January 21, , with Ebert contributing a review voiced by Bill Kurtis in a brief segment called "Roger's Office," [ 72 ] as well as traditional film reviews in the At the Movies format by Christy Lemire and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky. In , he published his memoir, Life Itself , in which he describes his childhood, his career, his struggles with alcoholism and cancer, his loves and friendships.
In his last blog entry, posted two days before his death, Ebert wrote that his cancer had returned and he was taking "a leave of presence. It means I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me. A critic must be honest enough to admit he is that man.
He awarded four stars to films of the highest quality, and generally a half star to those of the lowest, unless he considered the film to be "artistically inept and morally repugnant", in which case it received no stars, as with Death Wish II. When you ask a friend if Hellboy is any good, you're not asking if it's any good compared to Mystic River , you're asking if it's any good compared to The Punisher.
And my answer would be, on a scale of one to four, if Superman is four, then Hellboy is three and The Punisher is two. Although Ebert rarely wrote outright scathing reviews, he had a reputation for writing memorable ones for the films he really hated, such as North. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it.
Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it. Oh, I've seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line" and concluded that the film "should be cut up to provide free ukulele picks for the poor.
Ebert's reviews were also characterized by "dry wit. Brody's "friends pooh-pooh the notion that a shark could identify, follow or even care about one individual human being, but I am willing to grant the point, for the benefit of the plot. I believe that the shark wants revenge against Mrs. I really do believe it. After all, her husband was one of the men who hunted this shark and killed it, blowing it to bits.
And what shark wouldn't want revenge against the survivors of the men who killed it? Here are some things, however, that I do not believe", going on to list the other ways the film strained credulity. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialog, it will not be because you admire them.
He's just trying to tell you what he thinks, and to provoke some thought on your part about how movies work and what they can do". Ebert often included personal anecdotes in his reviews; reviewing The Last Picture Show , he recalls his early days as a moviegoer: "For five or six years of my life the years between when I was old enough to go alone, and when TV came to town Saturday afternoon at the Princess was a descent into a dark magical cave that smelled of Jujubes, melted Dreamsicles and Crisco in the popcorn machine.
It was probably on one of those Saturday afternoons that I formed my first critical opinion, deciding vaguely that there was something about John Wayne that set him apart from ordinary cowboys. In a curious sense, the events in the movie seem real, and I seem to be a part of them My list of other out-of-the-body films is a short and odd one, ranging from the artistry of Bonnie and Clyde or Cries and Whispers to the slick commercialism of Jaws and the brutal strength of Taxi Driver.
Alex Ross , music critic for The New Yorker , wrote of how Ebert had influenced his writing: "I noticed how much Ebert could put across in a limited space. He didn't waste time clearing his throat. Often, he managed to smuggle the basics of the plot into a larger thesis about the movie, so that you don't notice the exposition taking place: ' Broadcast News is as knowledgeable about the TV news-gathering process as any movie ever made, but it also has insights into the more personal matter of how people use high-pressure jobs as a way of avoiding time alone with themselves.
One way or another, he pulls you in. When he feels strongly, he can bang his fist in an impressive way. His review of Apocalypse Now ends thus: 'The whole huge grand mystery of the world, so terrible, so beautiful, seems to hang in the balance. People often ask me, "Do you ever change your mind about a movie? I was simply wrong.
I also turned around on Groundhog Day , which made it into this book when I belatedly caught on that it wasn't about the weatherman's predicament but about the nature of time and will. Perhaps when I first saw it I allowed myself to be distracted by Bill Murray 's mainstream comedy reputation.
But someone in film school somewhere is probably even now writing a thesis about how Murray's famous cameos represent an injection of philosophy into those pictures. Movies do not change, but their viewers do. When I first saw La Dolce Vita in , I was an adolescent for whom "the sweet life" represented everything I dreamed of: sin, exotic European glamour, the weary romance of the cynical newspaperman.
When I saw the movie around , Marcello was the same age, but I was ten years older, had stopped drinking, and saw him not as role model, but as a victim, condemned to an endless search for happiness that could never be found, not that way. By , when I analyzed the film a frame at a time at the University of Colorado , Marcello seemed younger still, and while I had once admired and then criticized him, now I pitied and loved him.
And when I saw the movie right after Mastroianni died, I thought that Fellini and Marcello had taken a moment of discovery and made it immortal. There may be no such thing as the sweet life. But it is necessary to find that out for yourself. If I had to make a generalization, I would say that many of my favorite movies are about Good People Casablanca is about people who do the right thing.
The Third Man is about people who do the right thing and can never speak to one another as a result Not all good movies are about Good People. I also like movies about bad people who have a sense of humor. Orson Welles , who does not play either of the good people in The Third Man , has such a winning way, such witty dialogue, that for a scene or two we almost forgive him his crimes.
Henry Hill, the hero of Goodfellas , is not a good fella, but he has the ability to be honest with us about why he enjoyed being bad. He is not a hypocrite. Of the other movies I love, some are simply about the joy of physical movement. When Gene Kelly splashes through Singin' in the Rain , when Judy Garland follows the yellow brick road, when Fred Astaire dances on the ceiling, when John Wayne puts the reins in his teeth and gallops across the mountain meadow, there is a purity and joy that cannot be resisted.
Another view of the room. The mother folding clothes. A shot down a corridor with a mother crossing it at an angle, and then a daughter crossing at the back. A reverse shot in the hallway as the arriving father is greeted by the mother and daughter. A shot as the father leaves the frame, then the mother, then the daughter.
A shot as the mother and father enter the room, as in the background the daughter picks up the red pot and leaves the frame. This sequence of timed movement and cutting is as perfect as any music ever written, any dance, any poem. Ebert credits film historian Donald Richie and the Hawaii International Film Festival for introducing him to Asian cinema through Richie's invitation to join him on the jury of the festival in , which quickly became a favorite of his and would frequently attend along with Richie, lending their support to validate the festival's status as a "festival of record".
Most people still know who Hitchcock was, I guess. Ebert argued for the aesthetic values of black-and-white photography and against colorization, writing:. Black-and-white movies present the deliberate absence of color. This makes them less realistic than color films for the real world is in color.
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They are more dreamlike, more pure, composed of shapes and forms and movements and light and shadow. Color films can simply be illuminated. Black-and-white films have to be lighted Black and white is a legitimate and beautiful artistic choice in motion pictures, creating feelings and effects that cannot be obtained any other way.
He wrote: "Black-and-white or, more accurately, silver-and-white creates a mysterious dream state, a simpler world of form and gesture.
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Most people do not agree with me. They like color and think a black-and-white film is missing something. Try this. If you have wedding photographs of your parents and grandparents, chances are your parents are in color and your grandparents are in black and white. Put the two photographs side by side and consider them honestly.
Your grandparents look timeless. Your parents look goofy. The next time you buy film for your camera, buy a roll of black-and-white. Go outside at dusk, when the daylight is diffused. Stand on the side of the house away from the sunset. Shoot some natural-light closeups of a friend. Have the pictures printed big, at least 5 x 7.
The same thing happens in the movies. Ebert championed animation, particularly the films of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. Here is one of them. I want to see wondrous sights not available in the real world, in stories where myth and dreams are set free to play. Animation opens that possibility, because it is freed from gravity and the chains of the possible.
Realistic films show the physical world; animation shows its essence. Animated films are not copies of 'real movies,' are not shadows of reality, but create a new existence in their own right. Ebert championed documentaries, notably Errol Morris 's Gates of Heaven : "They say you can make a great documentary about anything, as long as you see it well enough and truly, and this film proves it.
Gates of Heaven , which has no connection to the unfortunate Heaven's Gate , is about a couple of pet cemeteries and their owners. It was filmed in Southern California, so of course we expect a sardonic look at the peculiarities of the Moonbeam State. But then Gates of Heaven grows ever so much more complex and frightening, until at the end it is about such large issues as love, immortality, failure, and the dogged elusiveness of the American Dream.
Hoop Dreams , however, is not only documentary. It is also poetry and prose, muckraking and expose, journalism and polemic. It is one of the great moviegoing experiences of my lifetime. If a movie can illuminate the lives of other people who share this planet with us and show us not only how different they are but, how even so, they share the same dreams and hurts, then it deserves to be called great.
Ebert said that his favorite film was Citizen Kane , joking, "That's the official answer," although he preferred to emphasize it as "the most important" film. He said seeing The Third Man cemented his love of cinema: "This movie is on the altar of my love for the cinema. It was so sad, so beautiful, so romantic, that it became at once a part of my own memories — as if it had happened to me.
His favorite actor was Robert Mitchum and his favorite actress was Ingrid Bergman. Ebert made annual "ten best lists" from to Ebert revisited and sometimes revised his opinions. After ranking E. In , Ebert noted his own "tendency to place what I now consider the year's best film in second place, perhaps because I was trying to make some kind of point with my top pick," [ ] adding, "In , I should have ranked above The Battle of Algiers.
Miller was better than The Last Picture Show. In , Chinatown was probably better, in a different way, than Scenes from a Marriage. I hope not. Ebert's ten best lists resumed in , the first full year after his death, as a Borda count system by his writers. Ebert compiled "best of the decade" movie lists in the s for the s to the s, thereby helping provide an overview of his critical preferences.
In , the editors of RogerEbert. His main arguments were that they were too strict on sex and profanity, too lenient on violence, secretive with their guidelines, inconsistent in applying them and not willing to consider the wider context and meaning of the film.
Ebert also frequently lamented that cinemas outside major cities are "booked by computer from Hollywood with no regard for local tastes," making high-quality independent and foreign films virtually unavailable to most American moviegoers. He wrote that "I've always preferred generic approach to film criticism; I ask myself how good a movie is of its type.
Readers wrote to ask how I could possibly support such a movie. But I wasn't supporting it so much as describing it: You don't want to be scared? Don't see it. Credit must be paid to directors who want to really frighten us, to make a good thriller when quite possibly a bad one would have made as much money. Hitchcock is acknowledged as a master of suspense; it's hypocrisy to disapprove of other directors in the same genre who want to scare us too.
Ebert did not believe in grading children's movies on a curve, as he thought children were smarter than given credit for and deserved quality entertainment. They are among the sharpest, cleverest, most eagle-eyed creatures on God's green Earth, and very little escapes their notice. You may not have observed that your neighbor is still using his snow-tires in mid-July, but every four-year-old on the block has, and kids pay the same attention when they go to the movies.
They don't miss a thing, and have an instinctive contempt for shoddy and shabby work. I make this observation because nine out of ten kids' movies are stupid, witless and display contempt for their audiences. Is that all parents want from kids' movies? That they not have anything bad in them? Shouldn't they have something good in them — some life, imagination, fantasy, inventiveness, something to tickle the imagination?
If a movie isn't going to do your kids any good, why let them watch it? Just to kill a Saturday afternoon? That shows a subtle contempt for a child's mind, I think. Ebert tried not to judge a film on its ideology. Reviewing Apocalypse Now , he writes: "I am not particularly interested in the 'ideas' in Coppola's film Like all great works of art about war, Apocalypse Now essentially contains only one idea or message, the not-especially-enlightening observation that war is hell.
We do not go to see Coppola's movie for that insight — something Coppola, but not some of his critics, knows well. Coppola also well knows and demonstrated in The Godfather films that movies aren't especially good at dealing with abstract ideas — for those you'd be better off turning to the written word — but they are superb for presenting moods and feelings, the look of a battle, the expression on a face, the mood of a country.
Apocalypse Now achieves greatness not by analyzing our 'experience in Vietnam,' but by re-creating, in characters and images, something of that experience. Those articles say more about their authors than about the movie. I believe that any good-hearted person, white or black, will come out of this movie with sympathy for all of the characters.
Lee does not ask us to forgive them, or even to understand everything they do, but he wants us to identify with their fears and frustrations. Do the Right Thing doesn't ask its audiences to choose sides; it is scrupulously fair to both sides, in a story where it is our society itself that is not fair. Metacritic later noted that Ebert tended to give more lenient ratings than most critics.
Writing in Hazlitt about Ebert's reviews, Will Sloan argued that "[t]here were inevitably movies where he veered from consensus, but he was not provocative or idiosyncratic by nature. Ebert reflected on his Speed 2 review in , and wrote that it was "Frequently cited as an example of what a lousy critic I am," but defended his opinion, and noted, "I'm grateful to movies that show me what I haven't seen before, and Speed 2 had a cruise ship plowing right up the main street of a Caribbean village.
In addition to film, Ebert occasionally wrote about other topics for the Sun-Times , such as music. In , Ebert wrote the first published concert review of singer-songwriter John Prine , who at the time was working as a mailman and performing at Chicago folk clubs. Ebert was a lifelong reader, and said he had "more or less every book I have owned since I was seven, starting with Huckleberry Finn.
He relished it, savored it, inhaled it, and after memorizing it rolled it on his tongue and spoke it aloud. It was Nack who already knew in the early s, when he was a very young man, that Nabokov was perhaps the supreme stylist of modern novelists. He recited to me from Lolita , and from Speak, Memory and Pnin. I was spellbound. Have you ever read The Quincunx?
The Raj Quartet? A Fine Balance? Does anybody hold up better than Joseph Conrad and Willa Cather? Know any Yeats by heart? Surely P. Wodehouse is as great at what he does as Shakespeare was at what he did. Ebert first visited London in with his professor Daniel Curley , who "started me on a lifelong practice of wandering around London.
From to , I visited London never less than once a year and usually more than that. Walking the city became a part of my education, and in this way I learned a little about architecture, British watercolors, music, theater and above all people. I felt a freedom in London I've never felt elsewhere. I made lasting friends. The city lends itself to walking, can be intensely exciting at eye level, and is being eaten alive block by block by brutal corporate leg-lifting.
It was there that he coined the Boulder Pledge: "Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message.
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Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community. He wrote " Boulder is my hometown in an alternate universe. I have walked its streets by day and night, in rain, snow, and sunshine. I have made life-long friends there.
I was in my twenties when I first came to the Conference on World Affairs and was greeted by Howard Higman , its choleric founder, with 'Who invited you back? After that, Ebert announced that he would not return to the conference: "It is fueled by speech, and I'm out of gas But I went there for my adult lifetime and had a hell of a good time.
His camera is active, not passive. The production design, while adequate, never distinguishes itself from any other 50's period film. Coulter is strongest when bringing out the relationships between the players in the film. The interplay between the characters, the relationships developed and the tensions created are all convincing, though they all become histrionic when Coulter switches to the storyline of P.
Louis Simo Adrien Brody , a detective determined to discover the truth about the death of Reeves. Coulter doesn't give his audience an easy out by providing a definite answer on the death of Reeves. Did he kill himself? Was it an ordered hit by his ex-mistresses ticked off hubby? Was it an accidental shooting by Leonore during an argument? Accolades [ edit ].
References [ edit ]. Box Office Mojo.
Chaz ebert: A POSTER for the period drama “Hollywoodland” says that “dying in Hollywood can make you a legend.” George Reeves would have been flattered.
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Toggle the table of contents. Theatrical release poster. Jonathan Freeman. Best Supporting Actor.