Roger Ebert Quotes

I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

Of that one, I wrote: “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.

A work is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about what it is about.

"Siskel's Saw. "It's amazing how many movies are not as interesting as a documentary of the same actors sitting around talking over lunch."
GENE SISKEL"

If I were more of a hero, I would spend the next couple of weeks breaking into theaters where this movie is being shown, and leading the audience to safety.

Parents and schools should place great emphasis on the idea that it is all right to be different. Racism and all the other 'isms' grow from primitive tribalism, the instinctive hostility against those of another tribe, race, religion, nationality, class or whatever. You are a lucky child if your parents taught you to accept diversity.

[Pauline Kael] had no theory, no rules, no guidelines, no objective standards. You couldn’t apply her ‘approach’ to a film. With her it was all personal.

One of my delights in these books, on the other hand, has been to include movies not often cited as “great” — some because they are dismissed as merely popular (Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark), some because they are frankly entertainments (Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Rififi), some because they are too obscure (The Fall of the House of Usher, Stroszek). We go to different movies for different reasons, and greatness comes in many forms.

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its “self-help” section: “For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history, and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

The other Bonds were not wrong in the role (even Lazenby has his defenders), but they were not Connery, and that was their cross to bear.

Most courtroom movies feel it necessary to end with a clear-cut verdict. But 12 Angry Men never states whether the defendant is innocent or guilty. It is about whether the jury has a reasonable doubt about his guilt.

You know a movie is slow when you start looking to see what time it is. You know it’s awful when you start shaking your watch to see if it has stopped.

and the sexes eyeing each other uneasily, for nothing is easier for a teenager to imagine than rejection.

sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it. François Truffaut said that for a director it was an inspiring sight to walk to the front of a movie theater, turn around, and look back at the faces of the audience, turned up to the light from the screen. If the film is any good, those faces reflect an out-of-the-body experience: The audience for a brief time is somewhere else, sometime else, concerned with lives that are not its own. Of all the arts, movies are

It is commonplace to say that silent films are more “dreamlike,” but what does that mean? In Nosferatu, it means that the characters are confronted with alarming images and denied the freedom to talk them away. There is no repartee in nightmares. Human speech dissipates the shadows and makes a room seem normal. Those things that live only at night do not need to talk, for their victims are asleep, waiting.