Roger Ebert Quotes

I don't really say much about reviewers. It's a very tough job to get all of the depth of a movie all at once.

Pauline Kael had seen Nashville, and she loved Nashville. When I called her, she immediately responded to me because we had become friends, and I told her how great this film was, and she told me, "Well, I'll have to see it for myself." So I showed it to her, and she flipped.

I love film criticism as an art. I think it's a very important thing.

I came to the conviction that film criticism, in and of itself, was an art.

It's hard to see a film one time and really "get it," and write fully and intelligently about it. That's a review. That's not film criticism.

I constantly remind myself that there are terrible movies out there. I try to watch them, some of them, to give myself an understanding of what not to do.

I loved that these two guys argued with each other as if movies actually mattered. Nobody I knew talked about movies that way, but Siskel and Ebert took each movie as it came and talked about whether it was a success on its own terms.

What I expect of a movie reviewer is that he should love cinema as much as I do.

There's a lot of vitriolic ranting out there, but there are literally hundreds of critics on the web who care deeply about film and having something to say about it.

Reviews about film acting are very... tricky, because movies are such a collaborative thing.

Actually, what will be shown from here to eternity will be Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr cavorting on the beach. 'From Here to Eternity' must have seemed like a chore to its director, Fred Zinnemann.

I think the job of movie reviewing can be really tough. If a film has layers that need to be thought about, it's easy to get missed the first time around.

I don't mind other guys seeing movies I want to see and then writing about them. That's fine, especially when it's the 'New Yorker''s Anthony Lane, because he knows this stuff pretty well.

'Beloved.' That's an amazing film and I'm sorry more people didn't see it when it came out.

I recently watched Peter Brook's Lord of the Flies, and it wasn't a favorite film. Then I saw the one that was made in 1990, which in my opinion didn't match up to the original.

I have kind of a funny relationship with movies. I don't have to see the whole movie to get an impression of it or to let it have an influence on me.

I have a rule now that I can only watch a movie twice. By the third time I was watching 'The Guest,' I was hating everything about it, but the first time, I loved it. The first time you watch it, you watch it as a whole. And the second time, I think you can learn a lot. By the third time, you are just picking everything apart.

I never think of a film after I finish it.

I'm one of those directors who read reviews, even if they're bad, because I started as a film critic as a cinema student. I indulge in the art of criticism in general.

Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.

It's hard to see a film one time and really "get it," and write fully and intelligently about it. That's a review. That's not film criticism. And there's so many expectations involved, too. You're going in to see the latest Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick film, you really have high hopes, and you can't help but find that it's not exactly what you had in your head going in. Until you can watch it again, you can't accept the work for what it intends to be. It takes at least a second viewing.

I'm very careful of not being critical of other people's movies, which work in different styles. I think some of my movies can be interpreted as critical of their subjects.

For the movie review columns, I always knew exactly what I was going to write about - the movies.

I was never a critic. I was a journalist and wrote about filmmakers, but I didn't review movies per se. I make that distinction only because I came to it strictly as someone who was just a lover of storytellers and cinematic storytellers. And I still am. I'm still a great movie fan, and I ,that love of movies is very much alive in me. I approach the movies I make as a movie-lover as much as a movie-maker.

I don't want to insert myself into the story. I just want to give a useful analysis of it to help people come to their own conclusions.