Roger Ebert
Art is the closest we can come to understanding how a stranger really feels.Collection: Art
Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica.Collection: Cannes Film Festival
It is an interesting law of romance that a truly strong woman will choose a strong man who disagrees with her over a weak one who goes along. Strength demands intelligence, intelligence demands stimulation, and weakness is boring. It is better to find a partner you can contend with for a lifetime than one who accommodates you because he doesn't really care.Collection: Strong Women
Fellini was more in love with breasts than Russ Meyer, more wracked with guilt than Ingmar Bergman, more of a flamboyant showman than Busby Berkeley... Amarcord seems almost to flow from the camera, as anecdotes will flow from one who has told them often and knows they work. This was the last of his films made for no better reason than Fellini wanted to make it.Collection: Guilt
We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try.Collection: Joy
Just write, get better, keep writing, keep getting better. It's the only thing you can control.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Stars
Sometimes, it's all about the casting.Collection: Casting
When a girl says she likes you as a friend, what she means is: "Rather than have sex with you, I would prefer to lose you as a friend."Collection: Girl
In thinking about 'depressing movies,' many people don't realize that all bad movies are depressing, and no good movies are.Collection: Depressing
What I believe is that all clear-minded people should remain two things throughout their lifetimes: Curious and teachable.Collection: Wisdom
Socrates told us, "the unexamined life is not worth living." I think he's calling for curiosity, more than knowledge. In every human society at all times and at all levels, the curious are at the leading edge.Collection: Thinking
Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on December 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialog, it will not be because you admire them.Collection: Two
We feel the same emotions for our ideas as we do for the real world, which is why we can cry while reading a book, or fall in love with movie stars.Collection: Falling In Love
Dr. Leonard Shlain, chairman of laparoscopic surgery at California Pacific Medical Center, said they took some four and five year-olds and gave them video games and asked them to figure out how to play them without instructions. Then they watched their brain activity with real-time monitors. At first, when they were figuring out the games, he said, the whole brain lit up. But by the time they knew how to play the games, the brain went dark, except for one little point.Collection: Real
I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.Collection: Thinking
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. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.Collection: Pain
Battlefield Earth is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It's not merely bad; it's unpleasant in a hostile way.Collection: Long
If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn't.Collection: Asks
A film like Hoop Dreams is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and makes us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself.Collection: Dream
I am as fond of colorful language as anyone, but I try not to inflict it upon strangers. I suspect many people sense they should have better manners, and need only a nudge. In high school, I was addressed for the first time in my life as "Mister Ebert" by Stanley Hynes, an English teacher, and his formality transformed his classroom into a place where a certain courtliness prevailed.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Real
Clint, my hero, is coming across as sad and pathetic. He didn't need to do this to himself. It's unworthy of him.Collection: Hero
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.Collection: Food
CROUCHING TIGER is nevertheless a gloriously big epic, starring the Hong Kong action stars Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh in a visionary adventure where the characters seem set free from the force of gravity.Collection: Stars
Show me a sexual practice that involves ice cubes and hot sauce, and I will show you a sexual practice that would be improved without them.Collection: Ice
All good art is about something deeper than it admits.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Law
There are few lonelier sights than a good comedian being funny in a movie that doesn't know what funny is.Collection: Sight
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.Collection: Reading
I had a hard time watching "Wolf Creek." It is a film with one clear purpose: To establish the commercial credentials of its director by showing his skill at depicting the brutal tracking, torture and mutilation of screaming young women. When the killer severs the spine of one of his victims and calls her "a head on a stick," I wanted to walk out of the theater and keep on walking.Collection: Hard Times
Pixar is the first studio that is a movie star.Collection: Stars
Much has been written about Generation X and the films about it. Clerks is so utterly authentic that its heroes have never heard of their generation. When they think of "X," it's on the way to the video store.Collection: Hero
Life always has an unhappy ending, but you can have a lot of fun along the way, and everything doesn’t have to be dripping in deep significance.Collection: Fun
It’s hard to explain the fun to be found in seeing the right kind of bad movie.Collection: Fun
Why has Scandinavia been producing such good thrillers? Maybe because their filmmakers can’t afford millions for CGI and must rely on cheaper elements like, you know, stories and characters.Collection: Stories
Since any reasonable person would choose a Mac over a PC, Apple’s market share provides us with an accurate reading of the percentage of reasonable people in our society.Collection: Reading