Roger Joseph Ebert ( ; June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was an American film critic, film historian, essayist, screenwriter and author. He wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. Ebert was known for his intimate, Midwestern writing style and critical views informed by values of populism and humanism. Writing in a prose style intended to be entertaining and direct, he made sophisticated cinematic and analytical ideas more accessible to non-specialist audiences. Ebert endorsed foreign and independent films he believed would be appreciated by mainstream viewers, championing filmmakers like Werner Herzog, Errol Morris and Spike Lee, as well as Martin Scorsese, whose first published review he wrote. In 1975, Ebert became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times said Ebert "was without question the nation's most prominent and influential film critic", and Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called him "the best-known film critic in America". Per The New York Times, "The force and grace of his opinions propelled film criticism into the mainstream of American culture. Not only did he advise moviegoers about what to see, but also how to think about what they saw."

Early in his career, Ebert co-wrote the Russ Meyer film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). Starting in 1975 and continuing for decades, Ebert and Chicago Tribune critic Gene Siskel helped popularize nationally televised film reviewing when they co-hosted the PBS show Sneak Previews, followed by several variously named At the Movies programs on commercial TV broadcast syndication. The two verbally sparred and traded humorous barbs while discussing films. They created and trademarked the phrase "two thumbs up," used when both gave the same film a positive review. After Siskel died from a brain tumor in 1999, Ebert continued hosting the show with various co-hosts and then, starting in 2000, with Richard Roeper. In 1996, Ebert began publishing essays on great films of the past; the first hundred were published as The Great Movies. He published two more volumes, and a fourth was published posthumously. In 1999, he founded the Overlooked Film Festival in Champaign, Illinois.

In 2002, Ebert was diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid and salivary glands. He required treatment that included removing a section of his lower jaw in 2006, leaving him severely disfigured and unable to speak or eat normally. However, his ability to write remained unimpaired and he continued to publish frequently online and in print until his death in 2013. His RogerEbert.com website, launched in 2002, remains online as an archive of his published writings. Richard Corliss wrote, "Roger leaves a legacy of indefatigable connoisseurship in movies, literature, politics and, to quote the title of his 2011 autobiography, Life Itself." In 2014, Life Itself was adapted as a documentary of the same title, released to positive reviews.

Early life and education

Roger Joseph Ebert was born on June 18, 1942, in Urbana, Illinois, the only child of Annabel (), a bookkeeper, and Walter Harry Ebert, an electrician. and his maternal ancestry was Irish and Dutch. His first movie memory was of his parents taking him to see the Marx Brothers in A Day at the Races (1937). He wrote that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was "the first real book I ever read, and still the best". He began his writing career with his own newspaper, The Washington Street News, printed in his basement. He attended Urbana High School, where in his senior year he was class president and co-editor of his high school newspaper, The Echo. In 1958, he won the Illinois High School Association state speech championship in "radio speaking," an event that simulates radio newscasts.

Ebert began taking classes at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as an early-entrance student, completing his high school courses while also taking his first university class. After graduating from Urbana High School in 1960, he attended the University of Illinois and received his undergraduate degree in journalism in 1964. One of his classmates was Larry Woiwode, who went on to be the Poet Laureate of North Dakota. At The Daily Illini Ebert befriended William Nack, who as a sportswriter would cover Secretariat. As an undergraduate, he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity and president of the United States Student Press Association. One of the first reviews he wrote was of La Dolce Vita, published in The Daily Illini in October 1961.

As a graduate student, he "had the good fortune to enroll in a class on Shakespeare's tragedies taught by G. Blakemore Evans ... It was then that Shakespeare took hold of me, and it became clear he was the nearest we have come to a voice for what it means to be human." Ebert spent a semester as a master's student in the department of English there before attending the University of Cape Town on a Rotary fellowship for a year. He returned from Cape Town to his graduate studies at Illinois for two more semesters and then, after being accepted as a PhD student at the University of Chicago, he prepared to move to Chicago. He needed a job to support himself while he worked on his doctorate and so applied to the Chicago Daily News, hoping that, as he had already sold freelance pieces to the Daily News, including an article on the death of writer Brendan Behan, he would be hired by editor Herman Kogan.

Instead, Kogan referred Ebert to the city editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, Jim Hoge, who hired him as a reporter and feature writer in 1966. The paper wanted a young critic to cover movies like The Graduate and films by Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. The load of graduate school and being a film critic proved too much, so Ebert left the University of Chicago to focus his energies on film criticism.

Career

1967–1974: Early writings

thumb|right|Ebert (right) with [[Russ Meyer in 1970|alt=A black and white photograph of two men in suits. The man on the right is wearing glasses.]]

Ebert's first review for the Chicago Sun-Times began: "Georges Lautner's Galia opens and closes with arty shots of the ocean, mother of us all, but in between it's pretty clear that what is washing ashore is the French New Wave." He recalls that "Within a day after Zonka gave me the job, I read The Immediate Experience by Robert Warshow", from which he gleaned that "the critic has to set aside theory and ideology, theology and politics, and open himself to—well, the immediate experience." That same year, he met film critic Pauline Kael for the first time at the New York Film Festival. After he sent her some of his columns, she told him they were "the best film criticism being done in American newspapers today". He told his editor he wasn't sure how to review it when he didn't feel he could explain it. 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 (1967), 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". He concluded: "The fact that the story is set 35 years ago doesn't mean a thing. It had to be set some time. But it was made now and it's about us." Thirty-one years later, he wrote "When I saw it, I had been a film critic for less than six months, and it was the first masterpiece I had seen on the job. 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." He wrote Martin Scorsese's first review, for Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967, then titled I Call First), and predicted the young director could become "an American Fellini".

Ebert co-wrote the screenplay for Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) and sometimes joked about being responsible for it. It was poorly received on its release yet has become a cult film. Ebert and Meyer also made Up! (1976), Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979) and other films, and were involved in the ill-fated Sex Pistols film Who Killed Bambi? In April 2010, Ebert posted his screenplay of Who Killed Bambi?, also known as Anarchy in the UK, on his blog.

Ebert served on the jury at the 33rd Venice International Film Festival in 1972.

1975–1999: Stardom with Siskel & Ebert

alt=Color photo of a man in a tuxedo.|thumb|left|upright|Co-host [[Gene Siskel at the 1989 Academy Awards]]

In 1975, Ebert received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. The series was later picked up for national syndication on PBS. They trademarked the phrase "Two Thumbs Up". Ebert responded that "I am the first to agree with Corliss that the Siskel and Ebert program is not in-depth film criticism" but that "When we have an opinion about a movie, that opinion may light a bulb above the head of an ambitious youth who then understands that people can make up their own minds about movies." He also noted that they did "theme shows" condemning colorization and showing the virtues of letterboxing. 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. And then look at Cinéaste and American Film and the specialist film magazines (you may not read Fangoria, but if you did, you would be amazed at the erudition its writers bring to the horror and special effects genres.)" Corliss wrote that "I do think the program has other merits, and said so in a sentence of my original article that didn't make it into type: 'Sometimes the show does good: in spotlighting foreign and independent films, and in raising issues like censorship and colorization.' The stars' recent excoriation of the MPAA's X rating was salutary to the max."

In 1996, W. W. Norton & Company asked Ebert to edit an anthology of film writing. This resulted in Roger Ebert's Book of Film: From Tolstoy to Tarantino, the Finest Writing From a Century of Film. The selections are eclectic, ranging from Louise Brooks's autobiography to David Thomson's novel Suspects. Ebert "wrote to Nigel Wade, then the editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, and proposed a biweekly series of longer articles great movies of the past. He gave his blessing ... Every other week I have revisited a great movie, and the response has been encouraging." The first film he wrote about for the series was Casablanca (1942). A hundred of these essays were published as The Great Movies (2002); he released two more volumes, and a fourth was published posthumously. In 1999, Ebert founded The Overlooked Film Festival (later Ebertfest), in his hometown, Champaign, Illinois.

In May 1998, 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. In February 1999, Siskel died of a brain tumor. The producers renamed the show Roger Ebert & the Movies and used rotating co-hosts including Martin Scorsese,Janet Maslin and A.O. Scott. Ebert wrote of his late colleague: "For the first five years that we knew one another, Gene Siskel and I hardly spoke. Then it seemed like we never stopped." He wrote of Siskel's work ethic, of how quickly he returned to work after surgery: "Someone else might have taken a leave of absence then and there, but Gene worked as long as he could. 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." Ebert recalled, "Whenever he interviewed someone for his newspaper or for television, Gene Siskel liked to end with the same question: 'What do you know for sure?' OK Gene, what do I know for sure about you? 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." Ten years after Siskel's death, Ebert blogged about his colleague: "We once spoke with Disney and CBS about a sitcom to be titled Best Enemies. It would be about two movie critics joined in a love/hate relationship. 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."

2000–2006: Ebert & Roeper

In September 2000, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper became the permanent co-host and the show was renamed At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper and later Ebert & Roeper. In 2000, Ebert interviewed President Bill Clinton about movies at The White House.

In 2002, Ebert was diagnosed with cancer of the salivary glands. In 2006, cancer surgery resulted in his losing his ability to eat and speak. In 2007, prior to his Overlooked Film Festival, he posted a picture of his new condition. Paraphrasing a line from Raging Bull (1980), he wrote, "I ain't a pretty boy no more. (Not that I ever was. The original appeal of Siskel & Ebert was that we didn't look like we belonged on TV.)" He added that he would not miss the festival: "At least, not being able to speak, I am spared the need to explain why every film is 'overlooked', or why I wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls."

2007–2013: RogerEbert.com

Ebert in 2010|thumb|right

Ebert ended his association with At The Movies in July 2008, after Disney indicated it wished to take the program in a new direction. As of 2007, his reviews were syndicated to more than 200 newspapers in the United States and abroad. His RogerEbert.com website, launched in 2002 and originally underwritten by the Chicago Sun-Times, remains online as an archive of his published writings and reviews while also hosting new material written by a group of critics who were selected by Ebert before his death. Even as he used TV (and later the Internet) to share his reviews, Ebert continued to write for the Chicago Sun-Times until he died. On February 18, 2009, Ebert reported that he and Roeper would soon announce a new movie-review program, and reiterated this plan after Disney announced that the program's last episode would air in August 2010. In 2008, having lost his voice, he turned to blogging to express himself.

His final television series, Ebert Presents: At the Movies, premiered on January 21, 2011, with Ebert contributing a review voiced by Bill Kurtis in a brief segment called "Roger's Office," as well as traditional film reviews in the At the Movies format by Christy Lemire and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky. The program lasted one season, before being cancelled due to funding constraints. The last review Ebert published during his lifetime was for The Host, on March 27, 2013. The last review Ebert filed, published posthumously on April 6, 2013, was for To the Wonder. In July 2013, a previously unpublished review of Computer Chess appeared on RogerEbert.com. The review had been written in March but had remained unpublished until the film's wide-release date. Matt Zoller Seitz, the editor of RogerEbert.com, confirmed that there were other unpublished reviews that would eventually be posted.

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." "What in the world is 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. What's more, I'll be able at last to do what I've always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review." He signed off, "So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I'll see you at the movies."

Critical style

thumb|left|160px|Ebert cited [[Pauline Kael as an influence.]]

Ebert cited Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael as influences, and often quoted Robert Warshow, who said: "A man goes to the movies. A critic must be honest enough to admit he is that man." His own credo was: "Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions never lie to you."

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. He explained that his star ratings had little meaning outside the context of the review:

Although Ebert rarely wrote outright scathing reviews, he had a reputation for writing memorable ones for the films he really hated, such as North. Of that film, he wrote "I hated this movie. 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." He wrote that Mad Dog Time "is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. 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." Of Caligula, he wrote "It is not good art, it is not good cinema, and it is not good porn" and approvingly quoted the woman in front of him at the drinking fountain, who called it "the worst piece of shit I have ever seen."

Ebert's reviews were also characterized by "dry wit." He wrote "Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. 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 wrote: "Black-and-white (or, more accurately, silver-and-white) creates a mysterious dream state, a simpler world of form and gesture. 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. Ask yourself if this friend, who has always looked ordinary in every color photograph you've ever taken, does not suddenly, in black and white, somehow take on an aura of mystery. The same thing happens in the movies." In his review of Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke, he wrote: "I go to the movies for many reasons. 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." He concluded his review of Ratatouille by writing: "Every time an animated film is successful, you have to read all over again about how animation isn't 'just for children' but 'for the whole family,' and 'even for adults going on their own.' No kidding!"

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." Morris credited Ebert's review with putting him on the map. He championed Michael Apted's Up films, calling them "an inspired, even noble use of the medium." Ebert concluded his review of Hoop Dreams by writing: "Many filmgoers are reluctant to see documentaries, for reasons I've never understood; the good ones are frequently more absorbing and entertaining than fiction. 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."

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. I saw it for the first time in a little fleabox of a theater on the Left Bank in Paris, in 1962, during my first $5 a day trip to Europe. 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." He implied that his real favorite film was La Dolce Vita.

His favorite actor was Robert Mitchum and his favorite actress was Ingrid Bergman. He named Buster Keaton, Yasujirō Ozu, Robert Altman, Werner Herzog and Martin Scorsese as his favorite directors. He expressed his distaste for "top-10" lists, and all movie lists in general, but did make an annual list of the year's best films, joking that film critics are "required by unwritten law" to do so. He also contributed an all-time top-10 list for the decennial Sight & Sound Critics' poll in 1982, 1992, 2002 and 2012. In 1982, he chose, alphabetically, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Bonnie and Clyde, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, La Dolce Vita, Notorious, Persona, Taxi Driver and The Third Man. In 2012, he chose 2001: A Space Odyssey, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Apocalypse Now, Citizen Kane, La Dolce Vita, The General, Raging Bull, Tokyo Story, The Tree of Life and Vertigo. Several of the contributors to Ebert's website participated in a video tribute to him, featuring films that made his Sight & Sound list in 1982 and 2012.

Best films of the year

Ebert made annual "ten best lists" from 1967 to 2012. His choices for best film of the year were:

  • 1967: Bonnie and Clyde
  • 1968: The Battle of Algiers
  • 1969: Z
  • 1970: Five Easy Pieces
  • 1971: The Last Picture Show
  • 1972: The Godfather
  • 1973: Cries and Whispers
  • 1974: Scenes from a Marriage
  • 1975: Nashville
  • 1976: Small Change
  • 1977: 3 Women
  • 1978: An Unmarried Woman
  • 1979: Apocalypse Now
  • 1980: The Black Stallion
  • 1981: My Dinner with Andre
  • 1982: Sophie's Choice
  • 1983: The Right Stuff
  • 1984: Amadeus
  • 1985: The Color Purple
  • 1986: Platoon
  • 1987: House of Games
  • 1988: Mississippi Burning
  • 1989: Do the Right Thing
  • 1990: Goodfellas
  • 1991: JFK
  • 1992: Malcolm X
  • 1993: Schindler's List
  • 1994: Hoop Dreams
  • 1995: Leaving Las Vegas
  • 1996: Fargo
  • 1997: Eve's Bayou
  • 1998: Dark City
  • 1999: Being John Malkovich
  • 2000: Almost Famous
  • 2001: Monster's Ball
  • 2002: Minority Report
  • 2003: Monster
  • 2004: Million Dollar Baby
  • 2005: Crash
  • 2006: Pan's Labyrinth
  • 2007: Juno
  • 2008: Synecdoche, New York
  • 2009: The Hurt Locker
  • 2010: The Social Network
  • 2011: A Separation
  • 2012: Argo

Ebert revisited and sometimes revised his opinions. After ranking E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial third on his 1982 list, it was the only movie from that year to appear on his later "Best Films of the 1980s" list (where it also ranked third). He made similar reevaluations of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Ran (1985).

In 2006, 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 1968, I should have ranked 2001 above The Battle of Algiers. In 1971, McCabe & Mrs. Miller was better than The Last Picture Show. In 1974, Chinatown was probably better, in a different way, than Scenes from a Marriage. In 1976, how could I rank Small Change above Taxi Driver? In 1978, I would put Days of Heaven above An Unmarried Woman. And in 1980, of course, Raging Bull was a better film than The Black Stallion ... although I later chose Raging Bull as the best film of the entire decade of the 1980s, it was only the second-best film of 1980 ... am I the same person I was in 1968, 1971, or 1980? I hope not."

Best films of the decade

Ebert compiled "best of the decade" movie lists in the 2000s for the 1970s to the 2000s, thereby helping provide an overview of his critical preferences. Only three films for this listing were named by Ebert as the best film of the year, Five Easy Pieces (1970), Hoop Dreams (1994), and Synecdoche, New York (2008).

  • Five Easy Pieces (1970s)
  • Raging Bull (1980s)
  • Hoop Dreams (1990s)
  • Synecdoche, New York (2000s)

Genres and content

Ebert was often critical of the Motion Picture Association of America film rating system (MPAA). 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. He advocated replacing the NC-17 rating with separate ratings for pornographic and nonpornographic adult films. He signed off on his review of Almost Famous by asking, "Why did they give an R rating to a movie so perfect for teenagers?"

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."

He gave Halloween four stars: "Seeing it, I was reminded of the favorable review I gave a few years ago to Last House on the Left, another really terrifying thriller. 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. He began his review of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory: "Kids are not stupid. 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." He went on to say he thought Willy Wonka was the best movie of its kind since The Wizard of Oz.

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." Ebert commented on films using his Catholic upbringing as a point of reference: while he was critical of films he believed were ignorant or insulting regarding Catholicism, such as Stigmata (1999) and Priest (1994), he gave favorable reviews to controversial films relating to Christianity, such as The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), The Passion of the Christ (2004), and Dogma (1999). He defended Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing: "Some of the advance articles about this movie have suggested that it is an incitement to racial violence. 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."

Contrarian reviews

Metacritic later noted that Ebert tended to give more lenient ratings than most critics. His average film rating was 71%, if translated into a percentage, compared to 59% for the site as a whole. Of his reviews, 75% were positive and 75% of his ratings were better than his colleagues. Ebert had acknowledged in 2008 that he gave higher ratings on average than other critics, though he said this was in part because he considered a rating of 3 out of 4 stars to be the general threshold for a film to get a "thumbs up."

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." Examples of Ebert dissenting from other critics include his negative reviews of such celebrated films as Blue Velvet ("marred by sophomoric satire and cheap shots"), A Clockwork Orange ("a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading as an Orwellian warning"), and The Usual Suspects ("To the degree that I do understand, I don't care"). He gave only two out of four stars to the widely acclaimed Brazil, calling it "very hard to follow" and is the only critic on RottenTomatoes to not like it.

He gave a one-star review to the critically acclaimed Abbas Kiarostami film Taste of Cherry, which won the Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. Ebert later added the film to a list of his most-hated movies of all time. He was dismissive of the 1988 Bruce Willis action film Die Hard, stating that "inappropriate and wrongheaded interruptions reveal the fragile nature of the plot". His positive 3 out of 4 stars review of 1997's Speed 2: Cruise Control, "Movies like this embrace goofiness with an almost sensual pleasure" is one of only three positive reviews accounting for that film's 4% approval rating on the reviewer aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, one of the two others having been written by his At the Movies co-star Gene Siskel.

Ebert reflected on his Speed 2 review in 2013, 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 1999, Ebert held a contest for University of Colorado Boulder students to create short films with a Speed 3 theme about an object that could not stop moving.

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." Among the authors he considered indispensable were Shakespeare, Henry James, Willa Cather, Colette and Simenon. He writes of his friend William Nack: "He approached literature like a gourmet. 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 1960s, 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." Every time Ebert saw Nack, he'd ask him to recite the last lines of The Great Gatsby. Reviewing Stone Reader, he wrote: "get me in conversation with another reader, and I'll recite titles, too. Have you ever read The Quincunx? The Raj Quartet? A Fine Balance? Ever heard of that most despairing of all travel books, The Saddest Pleasure, by Moritz Thomsen? Does anybody hold up better than Joseph Conrad and Willa Cather? Know any Yeats by heart? Surely P. G. Wodehouse is as great at what he does as Shakespeare was at what he did." Among contemporary authors he admired Cormac McCarthy, and credited Suttree with reviving his love of reading after his illness. He also loved audiobooks, particularly praising Sean Barrett's reading of Perfume. He was a fan of Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin, which he read in French.

Ebert first visited London in 1966 with his professor Daniel Curley, who "started me on a lifelong practice of wandering around London. From 1966 to 2006, 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." Ebert and Curley coauthored The Perfect London Walk.

Ebert attended the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado Boulder for many years. 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. 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." Starting in 1975, he hosted a program called Cinema Interruptus, where would analyze a film with an audience, and anyone could say "Stop!" to point out anything they found interesting. 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?' Since then I have appeared on countless panels where I have learned and rehearsed debatemanship, the art of talking to anybody about anything." In 2009, Ebert invited Ramin Bahrani to join him in analyzing Bahrani's film Chop Shop a frame at a time. The next year, they invited Werner Herzog to join them in analyzing Aguirre, the Wrath of God. 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."

Relations with filmmakers

Ebert wrote Martin Scorsese's first review, for Who's That Knocking at My Door, and predicted the director could be "an American Fellini someday." Herzog dedicated his Encounters at the End of the World to Ebert, and Ebert responded with an open letter of gratitude. Ebert often quoted something Herzog told him: "our civilization is starving for new images."

When Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny (2003) premiered at Cannes, Ebert called it the worst film in the history of the festival. Gallo responded by putting a curse on his colon and a hex on his prostate. Ebert replied, "I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny." Gallo called Ebert a "fat pig". Ebert replied: "It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of The Brown Bunny." Ebert gave the director's cut a positive review, writing that Gallo "is not the director of the same Brown Bunny I saw at Cannes, and the film now plays so differently that I suggest the original Cannes cut be included as part of the eventual DVD, so that viewers can see for themselves how 26 minutes of aggressively pointless and empty footage can sink a potentially successful film...Make no mistake: The Cannes version was a bad film, but now Gallo's editing has set free the good film inside."

In 2005, Los Angeles Times critic Patrick Goldstein wrote that the year's Best Picture Nominees were "ignored, unloved and turned down flat by most of the same studios that ... bankroll hundreds of sequels, including a follow-up to Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic." Rob Schneider responded in an open letter: "Well, Mr. Goldstein, I decided to do some research to find out what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind ... Maybe you didn't win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven't invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who's Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers." Reviewing Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, Ebert responded: "Reading this, I was about to observe that Schneider can dish it out but he can't take it. Then I found he's not so good at dishing it out, either. I went online and found that Patrick Goldstein has won a National Headliner Award, a Los Angeles Press Club Award, a RockCritics.com award, and the Publicists' Guild award for lifetime achievement ... Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. Therefore, Goldstein is not qualified to complain that Columbia financed Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo while passing on the opportunity to participate in Million Dollar Baby, Ray, The Aviator, Sideways and Finding Neverland. As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks." After Ebert's cancer surgery, he received a bouquet from "Your Least Favorite Movie Star, Rob Schneider". Ebert wrote of the flowers, "They were a reminder, if I needed one, that although Rob Schneider might (in my opinion) have made a bad movie, he is not a bad man, and no doubt tried to make a wonderful movie, and hopes to again. I hope so, too."

Views on technology

Ebert was a strong advocate for Maxivision 48, in which the movie projector runs at 48 frames per second, as compared to the usual 24 frames per second. He was opposed to the practice whereby theaters lower the intensity of their projector bulbs in order to extend the life of the bulb, arguing that this has little effect other than to make the film harder to see. Ebert was skeptical of the resurgence of 3D effects in film, which he found unrealistic and distracting.

Views on video games as an art form

In 2005, Ebert opined that video games are not art, and are inferior to media created through authorial control, such as film and literature, stating, "video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful," but "the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art." This resulted in negative reaction from video game enthusiasts, such as writer Clive Barker, who defended video games as an art form. Responding to Barker, Ebert wrote, "I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist," and said that the main attributes of video games "have more in common with sports" than they do with arts. Ebert maintained his position in 2010, but conceded that he should not have expressed this skepticism without being more familiar with the actual experience of playing them. He admitted that he barely played video games: "I have played Cosmology of Kyoto which I enormously enjoyed, and Myst for which I lacked the patience." In the article, Ebert wrote, "It is quite possible a game could someday be great art." Ebert filed one other video game-related article for Wired in 1994, in which he described his visit to Sega's Joypolis arcade in Tokyo.

Appearances in other media

Ebert provided DVD audio commentaries for Citizen Kane (1941), Casablanca (1942), Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) and Dark City (1998). For the Criterion Collection, he recorded commentaries for Floating Weeds (1959) and Crumb (1994), the latter with director Terry Zwigoff. Ebert was also interviewed by Central Park Media for an extra feature on the DVD release of Grave of the Fireflies (1988).

In 1982, 1983 and 1985, Gene Siskel and Ebert appeared as themselves on Saturday Night Live. For their first two appearances, they reviewed sketches from that night's telecast; for their last, they reviewed sketches from the "SNL Film Festival". In 1991, Siskel and Ebert appeared in the Sesame Street segment "Sneak Peek Previews" (a parody of Sneak Previews). That year, the two were in the show's celebrity version of "Monster in the Mirror". In 1995, Siskel and Ebert guest-starred on an episode of the animated sitcom The Critic. In the episode, a parody of Sleepless in Seattle, Siskel and Ebert split and each wants protagonist Jay Sherman, a fellow film critic, as his new partner.

In 1997, Ebert appeared in Pitch, a documentary by Spencer Rice and Kenny Hotz and the Chicago-set television series Early Edition, where consoles a young boy who is depressed after he sees the character Bosco the Bunny die in a movie. Ebert made a cameo in Abby Singer (2003). In 2004, Ebert appeared in Sesame Streets direct-to-video special A Celebration of Me, Grover, delivering a review of the Monsterpiece Theater segment "The King and I". Ebert was one of the principal critics featured in Gerald Peary's 2009 documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism. He discusses the dynamics of appearing with Gene Siskel on the 1970s show Coming to a Theatre Near You, the predecessor of Sneak Previews on Chicago PBS station WTTW, and expresses approval of the proliferation of young people writing film reviews today on the internet. On October 22, 2010, Ebert appeared with Robert Osborne on Turner Classic Movies during their "The Essentials" series. Ebert selected Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and The Lady Eve (1941).

A "Mayor Ebert" (Michael Lerner) appeared in the 1998 remake of Godzilla. In his review, Ebert wrote: "Now that I've inspired a character in a Godzilla movie, all I really still desire is for several Ingmar Bergman characters to sit in a circle and read my reviews to one another in hushed tones."

Personal life

thumb|left|Ebert and his wife [[Chaz Ebert|Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert (left) giving the thumbs up to Nancy Kwan (right) at the Hawaii International Film Festival in 2010|alt=Three people are smiling with Hawaiian leis around their necks.]]

Marriage

At age 50, Ebert married trial attorney Charlie "Chaz" Hammel-Smith in 1992. Chaz Ebert became vice president of the Ebert Company and has emceed Ebertfest. He explained in his memoir, Life Itself, that he did not want to marry before his mother died, as he was afraid of displeasing her. In a July 2012 blog entry, Ebert wrote about Chaz, "She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she has my love, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone, which is where I seemed to be heading... She has been with me in sickness and in health, certainly far more sickness than we could have anticipated. I will be with her, strengthened by her example. She continues to make my life possible, and her presence fills me with love and a deep security. That's what a marriage is for. Now I know."

Alcoholism recovery

Ebert was a recovering alcoholic, having quit drinking in 1979. He was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and had written some blog entries on the subject.

Lou Lumenick incident

In September 2008, at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival, during the premiere of Slumdog Millionaire, Ebert was attacked by New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick, who was sitting in front of him. Ebert was inconvenienced by Lumenick obstructing his line of sight, could not see the subtitles, and tapped him on the shoulder a few times to get him to move a bit to the side. Lumenick abruptly rose from his seat, shouting "Don't touch me!"; he did this again a few minutes later and then also hit Ebert with a large binder, causing a loud noise that reportedly startled the audience. He then understood that he had yelled at and hit Ebert, but reportedly did not apologize at the time.

Health

thumb|Ebert (right) at the [[Conference on World Affairs in September 2002, shortly after his cancer diagnosis|alt=An image of a woman in a red dress speaking with a man, both sitting down.]]

In February 2002, Ebert was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer which was successfully removed. In 2003, he underwent surgery for salivary gland cancer, which was followed up by radiation therapy. He was again diagnosed with cancer in 2006. In June of that year, he had a mandibulectomy to remove cancerous tissue in the right side of his jaw. A week later he had a life-threatening complication when his carotid artery burst near the surgery site. He was confined to bed rest and was unable to speak, eat, or drink for a time, necessitating the use of a feeding tube.

The complications kept Ebert off the air for an extended period. Ebert made his first public appearance since mid-2006 at Ebertfest on April 25, 2007. He was unable to speak, instead communicating through his wife. He returned to reviewing on May 18, 2007, when three of his reviews were published in print. In July 2007, he revealed that he was still unable to speak. Ebert adopted a computerized voice system to communicate, eventually using a copy of his own voice created from his recordings by CereProc.

In March 2010, his health trials and new computerized voice were featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show. In 2011, Ebert gave a TED talk assisted by his wife, Chaz, and friends Dean Ornish and John Hunter, called "Remaking my voice" in which, he proposed a test to determine the verisimilitude of a synthesized voice.

Ebert underwent further surgery in January 2008 to try to restore his voice and address the complications from his previous surgeries. On April 1, Ebert announced his speech had not been restored. Ebert underwent further surgery in April 2008 after fracturing his hip in a fall. By 2011, Ebert had a prosthetic chin made to hide some of the damage done by his many surgeries.

In December 2012, Ebert was hospitalized due to the fractured hip, which was subsequently determined to be the result of cancer.

Ebert wrote that "what's sad about not eating" was:<blockquote>The loss of dining, not the loss of food. It may be personal, but for me, unless I'm alone, it doesn't involve dinner if it doesn't involve talking. The food and drink I can do without easily. The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss. Sentences beginning with the words, "Remember that time?" I ran in crowds where anyone was likely to break out in a poetry recitation at any time. Me too. But not me anymore. So yes, it's sad. Maybe that's why I enjoy this blog. You don't realize it, but we're at dinner right now. Ebert wrote of how his Catholic schooling led him to his politics: "Through a mental process that has by now become almost instinctive, those nuns guided me into supporting universal health care, the rightness of labor unions, fair taxation, prudence in warfare, kindness in peacetime, help for the hungry and homeless, and equal opportunity for the races and genders. It continues to surprise me that many who consider themselves religious seem to tilt away from me." He lamented that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn "has regrettably been under fire in recent years from myopic advocates of Political Correctness, who do not have a bone of irony (or humor) in their bodies, and cannot tell the difference between what is said or done in the novel, and what Twain means by it." Ebert defended the cast and crew of Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) during a Sundance Film Festival screening when a white member of the audience asked "Why, with the talent up there and yourself, make a film so empty and amoral for Asian Americans and for Americans?" Ebert responded that "What I find very offensive and condescending about your statement is nobody would say to a bunch of white filmmakers, 'How could you do this to 'your people'?...Asian-American characters have the right to be whoever the hell they want to be. They do not have to represent 'their people'!" He was a supporter of the film after the incident at Sundance.

Ebert opposed the Iraq War, writing: "Am I against the war? Of course. Do I support our troops? Of course. They were sent to endanger their lives by zealots with occult objectives." He endorsed Barack Obama for re-election in 2012, citing the Affordable Care Act as one important reason for his support of Obama. He was concerned about income inequality, writing: "I have no objection to financial success. I've had a lot of it myself. All of my income came from paychecks from jobs I held and books I published. I have the quaint idea that wealth should be obtained by legal and conventional means–by working, in other words–and not through the manipulation of financial scams. You're familiar with the ways bad mortgages were urged upon people who couldn't afford them, by banks who didn't care that the loans were bad. The banks made the loans and turned a profit by selling them to investors while at the same time betting against them on their own account. While Wall Street was knowingly trading the worthless paper that led to the financial collapse of 2008, executives were being paid huge bonuses." He voiced tentative support for the Occupy Wall Street movement: "I believe the Occupiers are opposed to the lawless and destructive greed in the financial industry, and the unhealthy spread in this country between the rich and the rest." Referring to the subprime mortgage crisis, he wrote: "I have also felt despair at the way financial instruments were created and manipulated to deliberately defraud the ordinary people in this country. At how home buyers were peddled mortgages they couldn't afford, and civilian investors were sold worthless 'securities' based on those bad mortgages. Wall Street felt no shame in backing paper that was intended to fail, and selling it to customers who trusted them. This is clear and documented. It is theft and fraud on a staggering scale." He was also sympathetic to Ron Paul, noting that he "speaks directly and clearly without a lot of hot air and lip flap". In a review of the 2008 documentary I.O.U.S.A., he credited Paul with being "a lonely voice talking about the debt", proposing based on the film that the US government was "already broke". He opposed the war on drugs and capital punishment.

Laura Emerick, his Sun Times editor, recalled: "His union sympathies began at an early age. His father, Walter, worked as an electrician, and Roger remained a member of the Newspaper Guild throughout his career — though after he became an independent contractor, he probably could have opted out. He famously stood with the Guild in 2004, when he wrote to then publisher John Cruickshank that 'it would be with a heavy heart that I would go on strike against my beloved Sun-Times, but strike I will if a strike is called.'" He lamented that "Most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out." Regarding his own freedom of speech, he said: "I write op-ed columns for the Chicago Sun-Times, and people send me e-mails saying, 'You're a movie critic. You don't know anything about politics.' Well, you know what, I'm 60 years old, and I've been interested in politics since I was on my daddy's knee.... I know a lot about politics."

Beliefs

Ebert was critical of intelligent design, and stated that people who believe in either creationism or New Age beliefs such as crystal healing or astrology should not be president. He wrote that in Catholic school he learned of the "Theory of Evolution, which in its elegance and blinding obviousness became one of the pillars of my reasoning, explaining so many things in so many ways. It was an introduction not only to logic but to symbolism, thus opening a window into poetry, literature and the arts in general. All my life I have deplored those who interpret something only on its most simplistic level."

Ebert described himself as an agnostic on at least one occasion, He wrote: "I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am still awake at night, asking how?