Roger Ebert became film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times in 1967. He is the only film critic with a star on Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame and was named honorary life member of the Directors' Guild of America. He won the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Screenwriters' Guild, and honorary degrees from the American Film Institute and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Since 1989 he has hosted Ebertfest, a film festival at the Virginia Theater in Champaign-Urbana. From 1975 until 2006 he, Gene Siskel and Richard Roeper co-hosted a weekly movie review program on national TV. He was Lecturer on Film for the University of Chicago extension program from 1970 until 2006, and recorded shot-by-shot commentaries for the DVDs of "Citizen Kane," "Casablanca," "Floating Weeds" and "Dark City," and has written over 20 books.
Loading...
Q. In your review for "The Conspiracy Theory," you go into a long speculation about how the script was probably great to begin with, but got screwed up as they catered to the audiences. Another production injustice has taken place…
From the revolutionary visual strategies of his first film, "Breathless" (1960), to his recent experiments with video, the French director Jean-Luc Godard has been on the cutting edge of cinema. The Music Box revival of a restored version of his…
Q. I saw "Dumb and Dumber" with my older brother, and I've never laughed harder or more continuously in a movie before or since. He saw it with his wife on video and was embarrassed. I saw "Hot Shots" with…
Q. I noticed that in the credits for "Men In Black" there was the standard mention of Humane Society monitoring but it did NOT say "no animals were harmed." Is this because cockroaches were killed? (Dan Sachs, Merrick, N.Y.)
It was the autumn of 1956, and I was a freshman at Urbana High School. Estes Kefauver, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, was coming to town. My father Walter, an electrician at the University of Illinois and a devout Democrat, thought…
Q. In the end credits for "Batman & Robin" they listed: "Dr. Fries Hairstylist." Since Arnold's character is bald for 99% of the movie was this an "in-joke" or was it a legitimate credit? (Gary Currie, Montreal)
All week people have been asking me who I liked better--Jimmy Stewart or Robert Mitchum? I wouldn't play the game. They were both one of a kind. Each had a style, a grace, a bearing, a voice, a face, a…
Q. I am fascinated by the legal issues that might come into play involving the marketing of "Hercules," in which many of the ads, whether in print or on TV, depict the character "Hades" giving "two thumbs up." I imagine…
Bye, bye, Mister American Pie.
In 1982, on Robert Mitchum's 65th birthday, I visited the set where he was making "That Championship Season," one of his 125 movies. I waited in the shadows, just watching, as he lit a Pall Mall and blew out smoke…
