Roger Ebert's Four Star Reviews, 1967-2007

by Roger Ebert

In The Immediate Experience, a book by Robert Warshaw, I found and underlined this sentence: “A man goes to the movies. The critic must admit that he is this man.” I translated that to mean that the critic must place experience above theory, must monitor what he actually thinks and feels during the film, and trust that above all. If the film is by a great director, does that make it a great film? If it comes from a disreputable genre, does that make it unworthy? In the mind of the critic, each film must earn its own living.

When I started on the job, I thought I would do it for perhaps five years. Now it has become a lifetime. I have become convinced in the process that the cinema is the best medium yet devised for observing, sharing, and shaping human experience. We are in the first days. What will The Godfather, La Dolce Vita, Vertigo, Raging Bull, or Rules of the Game tell those who live five hundred years from now? Will Buster Keaton still be funny? What would we give to have movies from five hundred years ago?

I came to believe that the lead paragraphs should not be the beginning of a formal top-down approach, but should read as if we had jumped into the middle of a conversation together. All my reviews began with the invisible words, “So, anyway…” I learned not to wait for inspiration, because it would come during the writing process. I found I was taking dictation from that place within my mind that always knew what I should write next.

Consider the reviews of Stanley Kauffmann, clear as crystal, deep with thought and experience. Or Kael, with her slangy riffs, digging you in the ribs. Or Bordwell, discussing the most subtle intonations in an Ozu film with an undertone of, “Look at this! It’s really elegant how he does it.”

Vince Lombardi was dead wrong when he said, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing” (a quote, by the way, first said not by Lombardi but in the 1930s by UCLA coach Henry “Red” Sanders—but since everybody thinks Lombardi said it, he won, I guess).

We already know something about the character, whose name is Severine. She is married to a rich, bland, young businessman (Jean Sorel). The marriage is comfortable but uneventful. An older friend (the saturnine Michel Piccoli) makes a bold attempt to seduce her, but she does not respond. “What interests me about you is your virtue,” he says. Perhaps that is why she is not interested: She desires not a man who thinks she is virtuous, but one who thinks she is not.

The movie understands the hypnotic intensity with which humans consider their own fantasies. When Severine enters a room where a client is waiting, her face doesn’t reflect curiosity or fear or anticipation—and least of all lust—because she is not regarding the room, she is regarding herself. What turns her on is not what she finds in the room, but that she is entering it.

I will not reveal the names of the key characters in the climactic scene, but note carefully what happens in terms of the story; perhaps the film is revealing that a bland exterior can hide seething resentment.

That is why I have so much trouble approaching Ray’s films as “foreign.” They are not foreign. They are about Indians, and I am not Indian, but Ray’s characters have more in common with me than I do with the comic-strip characters of Hollywood. Ray’s people have genuine emotions and ambitions, like the people next door and the people in Peoria and the people in Kansas City. There is not a person reading this review who would not identify immediately and deeply with the characters in The Big City. By contrast, Hollywood films with exploding cigarette lighters and gasping starlets and idiot plots are the real “foreign” films. They have nothing at all in common with us, and Satyajit Ray of India understands us better than Jerry Lewis.

In Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993, eighteen Americans lost their lives, seventy more were wounded, and within days President Bill Clinton pulled out troops that were on a humanitarian mission. By then some 300,000 Somalians had died of starvation, and the U.S. purpose was to help deliver UN food shipments. Somalian warlords were more interested in protecting their turf than feeding their people—an early warning of the kind of zeal that led to September 11.

We’re instinctively afraid of natural things (snakes, barking dogs, the dark), but have to be taught to fear walking into traffic or touching an electrical wire. Horror films that tap into our hard-wired instinctive fears probe a deeper place than movies with more sophisticated threats. A villain is only an actor, but a shark is more than a shark.

There is a new kind of movie emerging in the 1970s that considers, with almost frightening perceptiveness, the ways people really behave toward each other. No other art form is better suited to such subject matter than the movies; plays don’t let us get close enough, and novels try to describe things that can only be seen. But these new movies—with their attention to the smallest nuances of human behavior—are scary because they tell us so much about ourselves.

Used to be, in the long-ago days of romanticism in the movies, that a girl would peer soulfully into a boy’s eyes and say, “Tell me what you really think about me.” And then the boy, nobody’s fool, would answer quietly: “I think you’re wonderful.” These days, the boy more likely says, “I think the real reason you want me to answer that question is that you can’t answer it for yourself.” And then the girl, who looks like a terminal TB case, shivers and says, “You know too much about me. It’s scary.” And she puffs on her Silva Thin. Now this sort of honesty is all right for deep conversations over a cup of coffee in the student union, but it’s dangerous when practiced by couples over thirty. By then they’ve got a car and a house and kids, and who knows? If they start telling the truth too much they might have to decide who keeps the kids.

When Buck is reunited with his kid brother, they howl with glee and punch each other to disguise the truth that they have nothing to say.

In 1977, when the story opens, porn movies are shot on film and play in theaters, and a director can dream of making one so good that the audience members would want to stay in the theater even after they had achieved what they came for. By 1983, when the story closes, porn has shifted to video and most of the movies are basically just gynecological loops. There is hope, at the outset, that a porno movie could be “artistic,” and less hope at the end.

Nothing Cruise has done earlier will prepare you for what he does in Born on the Fourth of July. He has been hailed for years now as a great young American actor, but only his first film, Risky Business, found a perfect match between actor and role. Top Gun overwhelmed him with a special-effects display, The Color of Money didn’t explain his behavior in crucial final scenes, Cocktail was a cynical attempt to exploit his attractive image. Almost always he seemed to be holding something in reserve, standing back from his own presence. In Born on the Fourth of July, his performance is so good that the movie lives through it—Stone is able to make his statement with Cruise’s face and voice and doesn’t need to put everything into the dialogue.

There is a stretch when she knows, and yet she doesn’t know, because she doesn’t want to know; romance is built on illusion, and when we love someone, we love the illusion they have created for us.

His characters don’t look for it, they don’t like it, and they negotiate it with weariness and resignation. They’re too beat up by life to get any kind of exhilaration from a fight. They’ve been in far too many fights already, and lost most of them, and the violence they encounter is just another cross to bear.

Brokeback Mountain could tell its story and not necessarily be a great movie. It could be a melodrama. It could be a “gay cowboy movie.” But the filmmakers have focused so intently and with such feeling on Jack and Ennis that the movie is as observant as work by Bergman. Strange but true: The more specific a film is, the more universal, because the more it understands individual characters, the more it applies to everyone. I can imagine someone weeping at this film, identifying with it because he always wanted to stay in the marines, or be an artist or a cabinetmaker.

Ang Lee is a director whose films are set in many nations and many times. What they have in common is an instinctive sympathy for the characters. Born Chinese, he makes movies about Americans, British, Chinese, straights, gays; his sci-fi movie Hulk was about a misunderstood outsider. Here he respects the entire arc of his story, right down to the lonely conclusion.

Scorsese’s Casino is as concerned with history as with plot and character. The city of Las Vegas is his subject, and he shows how it permitted people like Ace, Ginger, and Nicky to flourish, and then spit them out, because the Vegas machine is too profitable and powerful to allow anyone to slow its operation.

Tarsem is an Indian, like M. Night Shyamalan of The Sixth Sense, and comes from a culture where ancient imagery and modern technology live side by side. In the 1970s, Pauline Kael wrote, the most interesting directors were Altman, Scorsese, and Coppola, because they were Catholics whose imaginations were enriched by the church of pre-Vatican II, while most other Americans were growing up on Eisenhower’s bland platitudes. Now our whole culture has been tamed by marketing and branding, and mass entertainment has been dumbed down. It is possible the next infusion of creativity will come from cultures like India, still rich in imagination, not yet locked into malls.

The lack of children and the possibility of children are the MacGuffins in Children of Men inspiring all the action, but the movie significantly never tells us why children stopped being born, or how they might become possible again. The children-as-MacGuffin is simply a dramatic device to avoid actual politics while showing how the world is slipping away from civility and coexistence. The film is not really about children; it is about men and women, and civilization, and the way that fear can be used to justify a police state.

We’d break a guy like Paul Newman if we had the chance, because he’s a troublemaker, a malcontent, a loner. Won’t have a drink with the boys. Doesn’t give to the United Fund.

As a respected white man, the schoolteacher is allowed access to the system—until it becomes obvious that he is asking the wrong questions and adopting the wrong attitude. Then he is ostracized. He loses his job. Shots are fired through his windows. His wife (Janet Suzman, brittle and unforgiving) is furious that he has betrayed his family by appearing to be a “kaffir lover.” His daughter finds him a disgrace.

“Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. “The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: ‘If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.’” In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News, and all the other news media who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on page one. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course, the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

The central characters are middle-aged, middle-class, and rather ordinary: a man and his wife. They have everything in the world they desire, except love and a sense of personal accomplishment. They’ve become consumers in the most cruel sense of that word: Their only identity is as economic beings who earn and spend money to sustain a meaningless existence. They don’t do anything, or make anything, or create anything. They use.

The Mellencamp character comes back to town with the idea that everyone will be more or less happy to see him. He is wrong. His friends and relatives have spent a long time thinking about his life in the fast lane, and there are a lot of jealousies and resentments. Lenz is particularly angry. She knows she was smart enough and pretty enough for him to take along when he made his break, and if he’s going to come back she isn’t going to simply smile and bite the bullet.

There was a time when Ingmar Bergman wanted to make films reflecting the whole of human experience. He asked the big questions about death, sex, and God, and he wasn’t afraid of the big, dramatic image, either. Who else (except Woody Allen) has had the temerity to show a man playing chess with Death? Bergman was swinging for the fences in those deliberately big, important films. But he has discovered that a better way to encompass all human experience is to be specific about a small part of it and let the audience draw its own conclusions. In The Seventh Seal (1956), he portrayed Death as a symbolic grim reaper. But in Cries and Whispers (1973), by showing one particular woman dying painfully while her sisters and her maid stood by helplessly, he said infinitely more about death.

And consider Ray Mendez. Here is a happy man. When he first learned of the discovery of the naked mole rat, he felt the joy of a lottery winner. There are not supposed to be mammals like this. They have no hair and no sweat glands because they live always in a controlled environment—their tunnels beneath the African savanna, where they organize themselves like insects. Mendez lives with mole rats in his office, and creates museum environments for them. That means he has to ask himself a question no scientist before him has ever asked: What makes a mole rat happy? So that they can tell the members of one colony from another, they roll cheerfully in their communal feces—but where do they like to do that? In a room at the end of a tunnel system or in the middle? Like the architect of a luxury hotel, Mendez wants his guests to feel comfortable.

The characters in Huston movies hardly ever achieve what they’re aiming for. Sam Spade, in The Maltese Falcon, Huston’s first film, ends up minus one partner and one woman he thought he could trust. Everyone is a loser in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and the gold blows back into the dust and is lost in it. Ahab, in Moby Dick. Marlon Brando’s career army officer in Reflections in a Golden Eye, even Bogart and Hepburn in The African Queen—they all fall short of their plans. The African Queen does have a happy ending, but it feels tacked-on and ridiculous, and the Queen destroys itself in destroying the German steamer.

When Thelen turns up at the bedroom window of her “real” true love (Craig Wasson) early in the movie and cheerfully offers to sleep with him, Wasson refuses, not only because he’s a high school kid who’s a little afraid of her—but also because he’s too much in love with his idea of her to want to make it real. By the time they finally do come back together, years later, they’ve both been through bad scenes, through madness, drug abuse, and the trauma of the war in Vietnam.

The director, Andrew Davis, has come up through a series of superior action films. His gift was apparent in one of his earlier features, the Chuck Norris thriller Code of Silence, which remains Norris’s best film and one of the best, most atmospheric uses of Chicago locations ever achieved. Davis’s good films continued with the Steven Seagal thriller Above the Law, The Package with Gene Hackman, and 1992’s superb Under Siege.

The film was made by a California filmmaker named Errol Morris, and it has been the subject of notoriety because Werner Herzog, the West German director, promised to eat his shoe if Morris ever finished it. Morris did finish it, and at the film’s premiere in Berkeley, Herzog indeed boiled and ate his shoe.

There is a summer in your life that is the last time boys and girls can be friends until they grow up. The summer when adolescence has arrived, but has not insisted on itself. When the stir of arriving sexuality still makes you feel hopeful instead of restless and troubled. When you feel powerful instead of unsure. That is the summer George Washington is about, and all it is about.

Zwigoff was plagued by agonizing back pain all during the period when he was making Crumb, and slept with a gun under his pillow, he told me, in case he had to end his misery in the middle of the night. When Crumb didn’t want to cooperate with the documentary, Zwigoff threatened to shoot himself. Crumb does not often meet his match, but did with Zwigoff.

Mankind has Shakespeares who were illiterate, Mozarts who never heard a note, Picassos who never touched a brush. Griet could be a painter. Whether a good or bad one, she will never know.

Varda is seventy-two and made her first film when she was twenty-six. She was the only woman director involved in the French New Wave, and has remained truer to its spirit than many of the others. Her features include such masterpieces as One Sings, the Other Doesn’t, Vagabond, and Kung Fu Master (which is not about kung fu but about love). Along the way she has made many documentaries, including Uncle Yanco (1968), about her uncle who lived on a houseboat in California and was a gleaner of sorts, and Daguerreotypes (1975), about the other people who live on her street. Her A Hundred and One Nights (1995) gleaned her favorite moments from a century of cinema.

Throbbing beneath the surface of GoodFellas, providing the magnet that pulls the plot along, are the great emotions in Hill’s makeup: a lust for recognition, a fear of powerlessness, and guilt. He loves it when the headwaiters know his name, but he doesn’t really have the stuff to be a great villain—he isn’t brave or heartless enough—and so when he does bad things, he feels bad afterward. He begins to hate himself. And yet, he cannot hate the things he covets. He wants the prizes, but he doesn’t want to pay for the tickets.

Williams’s best movies (Popeye, The World According to Garp, Moscow on the Hudson) are the ones where he is given a well-written character to play, and held to the character by a strong director. In his other movies, you can see him trying to do his stand-up act on the screen, trying to use comedy to conceal not only himself from the audience—but even his character. The one-liners and adlibs distance him from the material and from his fellow actors. Hey, he’s only a visitor here.

https://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/robin-williams-why-funny-people-kill-themselves/

His only flaw, I believe, is the introduction of limp, wordy Simon and Garfunkel songs and arty camera work to suggest the passage of time between major scenes. Otherwise, The Graduate is a success and Benjamin’s acute honesty and embarrassment are so accurately drawn that we hardly know whether to laugh or to look inside ourselves.

Guelwaar’s words are: “Make a man dependent on your charity and you make him your slave.” He argues that aid has destroyed the Senegalese economy and created a ruling class of thieves. And he shows how these facts have been obscured because political demagogues have fanned Muslim-Catholic rivalries, so that the proletariat fights among itself instead of against its exploiters.

And yet, on reflection, there is a tragedy buried in Hannah and Her Sisters, and that is the fact of Mickey’s status as the perennial outsider. The others get on with their lives, but Mickey is stuck with his complaints. Not only is he certain there is no afterlife, he is very afraid that this life might also be a sham. How he ever married Hannah in the first place is a mystery; it must have been an intermediate step on his journey to his true role in life, as the ex-husband and hanger-on.

The movie, which won the 1976 Academy Award for best feature-length documentary, was shot over a period of eighteen months in eastern Kentucky, after the miners at the Brookside mine voted to join the United Mine Workers. The Duke Power Company refused to sign the UMW contract, fought the strike, and was fought in turn by the miners and—most particularly—their wives. Barbara Kopple and her crew stayed in Harlan County during that entire time, living in the miners’ homes and recording the day-by-day progress of the strike.

She talks of her life, and he talks of his, including his long-ago romance with a member of the Isadora Duncan troupe. The last he’d heard of her, she was living in Peru, Indiana, as the wife of a pharmacist. The girl talks him into stopping in Indiana and looking the old woman up. And he does so, in a scene of rare warmth and tenderness. The woman, Jessie (played by Geraldine Fitzgerald), has a very shaky memory, but she does recall being a dancer, and in the calm of the recreation room at her nursing home, the old couple dances together one last time.

What’s developing here, it’s clear, is one of the most important franchises in movie history, a series of films that consolidate all of the advances in computer-aided animation, linked to the extraordinary creative work of J. K. Rowling, who has created a mythological world as grand as Star Wars, but filled with more wit and humanity. Although the young wizard Harry Potter is nominally the hero, the film remembers the golden age of moviemaking, when vivid supporting characters crowded the canvas. The story is about personalities, personal histories, and eccentricity, not about a superstar superman crushing the narrative with his egotistical weight.

Everything in this movie affirms life. Perhaps that is why Heartland can also be so unblinking in its consideration of death. The American West was not settled by people who spent all their time baking peach cobbler and knitting samplers, and this movie contains several scenes that will shock some audiences because of their forthright realism. We see a pig slaughtered, a calf birthed, cattle skinned, and a half-dead horse left out in the blizzard because there is simply nothing to feed it.

The women I recognize too. They’re more casual about romance than most movie characters, maybe because most movies are simpleminded and pretend it is earthshakingly important whether this boy and this girl mate forever, when a lot of young romance is just window-shopping and role-playing, and everyone knows it. You break up, you sigh, you move on. The process is so universal that with some people, you sigh as you meet them, in anticipation.

Both sets of parents are required to pay a small part of the tuition costs. When Gates’s family cannot pay, a member of the booster club pays for him—because he seems destined to be a high school all-American. Arthur at first does not seem as talented. And when he has to drop out of the school because his parents have both lost their jobs, there is no sponsor for him. Instead, there’s a telling scene where the school refuses to release his transcripts until the parents have paid their share of his tuition. The morality here is clear: St. Joseph’s wanted Arthur, recruited him, and would have found tuition funds for him if he had played up to expectations. When he did not, the school held the boy’s future as hostage for a debt his parents clearly would never have contracted if the school’s recruiters had not come scouting grade school playgrounds for the boy. No wonder St. Joseph’s feels uncomfortable. Its behavior seems like something out of Dickens. The name Scrooge comes to mind.

In 1994 in Rwanda, a million members of the Tutsi tribe were killed by members of the Hutu tribe, in a massacre that took place while the world looked away. Hotel Rwanda is not the story of that massacre. It is the story of a hotel manager who saved the lives of twelve hundred people by being, essentially, a very good hotel manager.