Roger Ebert died 10 years ago

April 4, 2023

Roger Ebert died 10 years ago today, on April 4, 2013, at age 70. 

I’ve quoted him and linked to him in my posts about many movies on this blog. Here are 10 highlights. (These are just brief excerpts; click the links to see them in context.)

• Ebert on Paris, Texas (my favorite of 1984): “‘Paris, Texas’ is more concerned with exploring emotions than with telling a story. This isn’t a movie about missing persons, but about missing feelings.”

• Ebert on About Last Night … (one of my favorites of 1986): “If one of the pleasures of moviegoing is seeing strange new things on the screen, another pleasure, and probably a deeper one, is experiencing moments of recognition — times when we can say, yes, that’s exactly right, that’s exactly the way it would have happened.”

• Ebert on American Graffiti (my favorite of 1973): “no sociological treatise could duplicate the movie’s success in remembering exactly how it was to be alive at that cultural instant.”

• Ebert on The Best Years of Our Lives (one of my favorites of 1946): “it feels surprisingly modern: lean, direct, honest about issues that Hollywood then studiously avoided.”

• Ebert on the audience’s reaction to the premiere of Five Easy Pieces (my favorite of 1970): “We’d had a revelation. This was the direction American movies should take: Into idiosyncratic characters, into dialogue with an ear for the vulgar and the literate, into a plot free to surprise us about the characters. …”

• Ebert on one scene in Vertigo (my favorite of 1958): “This shot, in its psychological, artistic and technical complexity, may be the one time in his entire career that Alfred Hitchcock completely revealed himself, in all of his passion and sadness.”

• Ebert on After Hours (one of my favorites of 1985 — recently added to HBO Max): “Scorsese’s ‘After Hours’ is a comedy, according to the strict definition of that word. … It is, however, the tensest comedy I can remember, building its nightmare situation step by insidious step until our laughter is hollow, or defensive.”

• Ebert on Ghost World (my favorite of 2001): “I wanted to hug this movie. It takes such a risky journey and never steps wrong.”

• In my post on Days of Heaven (my favorite of 1978), I said that “Ebert’s insight helped me watch this movie in the right frame of mind.” See that post to find out what I meant …

• Ebert on My Dinner with Andre (my favorite of 1981): “Someone asked me the other day if I could name a movie that was entirely devoid of clichés. I thought for a moment, and then answered, ‘My Dinner With Andre.’ … [T]here is nothing else like it.”

Ebert wasn’t the most intellectual of movie commentators. What set him apart was his ability to sum up what’s meaningful about a movie in just a few words, and to seem like a real human being who’s saying these things out of love and deep feelings, not professional obligation. Reading or watching Roger Ebert was like talking with that one friend of yours who loves movies more than anyone else you know.

From day one since I started this blog, I’ve always kept this quote from Ebert on the homepage:

“One of the gifts a movie lover can give another is the title of a wonderful film they have not yet discovered.”

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.