Roger Ebert Quotes

It is a truism that Hollywood trailers advertise not the movie that has been made, but the movie that the studio wishes had been made.

he knows he's running wild — and chooses to, burning up the future years of an empty lifetime for a few flashes of freedom

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.

A man goes to the movies. The critic must admit that he is this man.

We piled into the back of his big red Sun-Times truck: Robertson, McHugh, a bagpipe player, assorted other regulars, and Good Sydney Harris. Good Sydney Harris was a Spanish Civil War veteran, not to be confused with the Bad Sydney Harris, the Daily News columnist. Good Sydney had fallen into conversation with a dominatrix named Jake, who joined us.

Unlike modern films where superstars dominate every scene, the Hollywood films of the golden era have depth in writing and casting, so the story can resonate with more than one tone.

Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter’s basilica.

Their costumes look purchased from the Goodwill store on Tatoine.

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear

The world of French crime films is a particular place, informed by the French love for Hollywood film noir, a genre they identified and named. But the great French noirs of the 1950s are not copies of Hollywood; instead, they have a particularly French flavor.

I may appear to suffer from some sort of compulsive repetition syndrome, but these rituals are important to me. I have many places where I sit and think, “I have been here before, I am here now, and I will be here again.” Sometimes, lost in reverie, I remember myself approaching across the same green, or down the same footpath, in 1962 or 1983, or many other times. Sometimes Chaz comes along on my rituals, but just as often I go alone. Sometimes Chaz will say she’s going shopping, or visiting a friend, or just staying in the room and reading in bed. “Why don’t you go and touch your bases?” she’ll ask me. I know she sympathizes. These secret visits are a way for me to measure the wheel of the years and my passage through life. Sometimes on this voyage through life we need to sit on the deck and regard the waves.

Is she killing these guys in a blackout? Wasn’t it Ann Landers who said that’s one of the twenty danger signals of alcoholism?

Siskel’s classic question, “Is this movie better than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?

You look at them and wonder how, at any stage of the production, anyone could have thought there was a watchable movie here.

Fate is not merely knocking on the door, it has entered with a SWAT team and is banging their heads together and administering poppers.