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The buried code of many American films has become: If I kill you, I have won and you have lost. The instinctive ethical code of traditional Hollywood, the code by which characters like James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda lived, has been lost.

Roger Ebert

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Roger Ebert
Age: 70 †
Born: 1942
Born: June 18
Died: 2013
Died: April 4
Film Critic
Journalist
Presenter
Reporter
Screenwriter
Writer
Urbana
Illinois
Roger Joseph Ebert
Like
Characters
Buried
Lived
Ethical
American
Code
Fonda
Lost
John
Stewart
Film
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Kill
Henry
Character
Films
Wayne
Many
Hollywood
James

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It's the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot.
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The children of Birmingham did not really die in the State of Alabama, however, because Alabama is a state of mind, and in the minds of the [white] men who rule Alabama, those children had never lived [...] their blood is on so many hands, that history will weep in the telling...and it is not new blood. It is old, so very old.
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It is not enough for a movie to be righteous. It must also be watchable.
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A remarkable documentary that's also one of the most beautiful nature films I've seen.
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What's sad about not eating is the experience, whether at a family reunion or at midnight by yourself in a greasy spoon under the L tracks. The loss of dining, not the loss of food.
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We are the playthings of the gods.
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Going to a movie so you won't be offended is like eating potato chips made with Olestra you avoid the dangers of the real thing, but your insides fill up with synthetic runny stuff.
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James Cameron's films have always been distinguished by ground-breaking technical excellence.
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Dirty Love wasn't written and directed, it was committed. Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn't rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent... I am not certain that anyone involved has ever seen a movie, or knows what one is.
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It amazes me that filmmakers will still film, and audiences will still watch, relationships so bankrupt of human feeling that the characters could be reading dialogue written by a computer.
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Families and their problems go on and on, and they aren't solved, they're dealt with.
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There are two things you can't argue in film: comedy and eroticism. If something doesn't make you laugh, no one can tell you why it's funny, and it's difficult to reason someone out of an erection.
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Occasionally an unsuspecting innocent will stumble into a movie like this and send me an anguished postcard, asking how I could possibly give a favorable review to such trash. My stock response is Ebert's Law, which reads: A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.
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What in the world is a leave of presence? It means I am not going away.
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There are often lists of the great living male movie stars. How often do you see the name of Nicolas Cage? He should always be up there. He's daring and fearless in his choice of roles, and unafraid to crawl out on a limb, saw it off and remain suspended in air.
Roger Ebert
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The Bucket List is a movie about two old codgers who are nothing like people, both suffering from cancer that is nothing like cancer, and setting off on adventures that are nothing like possible. I urgently advise hospitals: Do not make the DVD available to your patients there may be an outbreak of bedpans thrown at TV screens.
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There must be a better reason to have a baby than to provide a plot point in a rom-com. Don't you think?
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I am proudly a liberal. I am also patriotic, reasonable, pro-American, and stand for family values.
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From a dramatic viewpoint, there are few professions that grant their members entry into other lives, high among them cops, doctors, clergymen, journalists and prostitutes. Perhaps that explains why they figure in so much television and cinema. Their lives are lived in the midst of human drama.
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Blockbusters run the mainstream industry. We may never again have a decade like the 1970s, when directors were able to find such freedom.
Roger Ebert