Matt writes: In his list ranking the best films of 1987, Roger Ebert included Taylor Hackford’s “Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll!,” calling it “the year's best musical documentary, a rollicking and sometimes revealing record of the attempt by Rolling Stone Keith Richards to stage a 60th birthday concert for Berry, at which the pioneer of rock and roll would at last be accompanied by a well-rehearsed backup band.” After Berry passed away last weekend, our critic Glenn Kenny penned an insightful obituary that paid tribute to Hackford’s film. “Aside from being a superb portrait of Berry—and of Richards, whose intelligence and clear devotion to music here belies his sometime rap as a wizened five-string-zombie,” wrote Kenny, “[it] is one of the great rock and roll documentaries.” And of Berry, Kenny argued, “For all the great things he achieved, he deserves to be the fifth face on Mount Rushmore.”

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Matt writes: Legendary French New Wave icon Agnès Varda was honored at the third annual Ebert Tribute ceremony during this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Brian Tallerico covered the event at RogerEbert.com, while Chaz Ebert assisted in putting together a Roger Favorites entry on Varda, compiling Roger's reviews of the director's work. Roger felt that Varda's 2008 film, "The Beaches of Agnès," contained “the most poetic shot about the cinema” that he had ever seen, in which “two old fishermen, who were young when she first filmed them, watch themselves on a screen” mounted on “an old market cart that they push through the nighttime streets of their village.”

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