It's been a while since I've posted here, but in honor of Roger Ebert's death, I decided to gather some of my favorite reviews of his. Ebert wrote so many great reviews that coming up with a definitive top 10 is impossible, but here's a list of the ones that have stood with me for a long time. I've included a link to the full review, followed by a quoted section of the review.
Note: I decided to focus on his positive reviews, but he wrote some delicious negative reviews. There's already a good guide to those on his site here: Ebert's Most Hated
Lucas
"To describe this situation is to make "Lucas" sound like just one more film about teenage romance. But it would be tragic if this film would get lost in the shuffle of "teenage movies." This is a movie that is as pure and true to the adolescent experience as Truffaut's "The 400 Blows." It is true because it assumes all of its characters are intelligent, and do not want to hurt one another, and will refuse to go along with the stupid, painful conformity of high school."
Say Anything
"The movie treats Diane's two relationships with equal seriousness. This is not one of those movies where the father is a dim-witted, middle-age buffoon with no insights into real life, and it is also not one of those movies where the young man is obviously the hero. Everyone in this film is complicated, and has problems, and is willing to work at life to try to make it better.
The romance between Diane and Lloyd is intelligent and filled with that special curiosity that happens when two young people find each other not only attractive but interesting - when they sense they might actually be able to learn something useful from the other person."
Running on Empty
"The film is a painful, enormously moving drama in which a choice must be made between sticking together or breaking up and maybe fulfilling a long-delayed potential. The parents never fulfilled whatever potential they had, because of their life underground. Now are they justified in asking their son to abandon his own future? And how will they do that? Push him out of the car, and drive away, and trust that he will find a home, just as the dog did? Lumet is one of the best directors at work today, and his skill here is in the way he takes a melodramatic plot and makes it real by making it specific."
Malcolm X
"Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" is one of the great screen biographies, celebrating the whole sweep of an American life that began in sorrow and bottomed out on the streets and in prison before its hero reinvented himself. Watching the film, I understood more clearly how we do have the power to change our own lives, how fate doesn't deal all of the cards. The film is inspirational and educational - and it is also entertaining, as movies must be before they can be anything else."
Wendy and Lucy
"I know so much about Wendy, although this movie tells me so little. I know almost nothing about where she came from, what her life was like, how realistic she is about the world, where her ambition lies. But I know, or feel, everything about Wendy at this moment: stranded in an Oregon town, broke, her dog lost, her car a write-off, hungry, friendless, quiet, filled with desperate resolve."
Moonlight Mile
"'Moonlight Mile' gives itself the freedom to feel contradictory things. It is sentimental but feels free to offend, is analytical and then surrenders to the illogic of its characters, is about grief and yet permits laughter. Everyone who has grieved for a loved one will recognize the moment, some days after the death, when an irreverent remark will release the surprise of laughter. Sometimes we laugh, that we may not cry. Not many movies know that truth. "Moonlight Mile" is based on it."
Ruby in Paradise
"When successful people tell their stories, you never hear much enthusiasm in their voices as they describe their most recent triumph. But their voices glow when they describe their first successes: Their first job, or the first time their talent was recognized, or the first time they realized what they were good at doing. That first chapter is the hard one to write. Then the rest of the book takes care of itself. "Ruby in Paradise" is a breathtaking movie about a young woman who opens the book of her life to a fresh page, and begins to write."
Searching for Bobby Fischer
"By the end of "Searching for Bobby Fischer" we have learned something about tournament chess, and a great deal about human nature. The film's implications are many. They center around our responsibility, if any, to our gifts. If we can operate at the genius level in a given field, does that mean we must - even if the cost is the sort of endless purgatory a Bobby Fischer has inhabited? It's an interesting question, and this movie doesn't avoid it.
At the end, it all comes down to that choice faced by the young player that A. S. Byatt writes about: the choice between truth and beauty. What makes us men is that we can think logically. What makes us human is that we sometimes choose not to."
The Sure Thing
The love story is one of Hollywood's missing genres. The movie industry seems better at teenage movies like "Porky's," with its sleazy shower scenes, than with screenplays that involve any sort of thought about the love lives of its characters. That's why "The Sure Thing" is a small miracle. Although the hero of this movie is promised by his buddy that he'll be fixed up with a "guaranteed sure thing," the film is not about the sure thing but about how this kid falls genuinely and touchingly into love.
Flirting
"So often we settle for noise and movement from the movie screen, for stupid people indulging unworthy fantasies. Only rare movies like "Flirting" remind us that the movies are capable of providing us with the touch of other lives, that when all the conditions are right we can grow a little and learn a little, just like the people on the screen. This movie is joyous, wise and life-affirming, and certainly one of the year's best films."
