Roger Ebert's Four Star Reviews, 1967-2007

by Roger Ebert

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is the best Disney animated feature since Beauty and the Beast—a whirling, uplifting, thrilling story with a heart-touching message that emerges from the comedy and song.

The owner of the bar is named, ironically, Harry Hope. He has so long ago abandoned any hope that he has not even stepped outside his establishment in twenty years. This place is the end of the road, the bottom of the sea, Larry says. But every man except Larry has a “pipe dream”— something to keep him going. Tomorrow one of them will sober up and get his job back. Tomorrow the assistant bartender will marry one of the whores and make her respectable. Tomorrow. Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh is the work of a man who has very nearly abandoned all hope. The only characters in it who summon up the courage to act (not to act positively, but to act at all) are Hickey, who kills his wife, and the boy Don, who kills himself. Larry, who is always the most intelligent man in the room, comes to the conclusion at the end of the play that death is not to be avoided but even to be welcomed.

Weaver character takes all she can of Kline’s musings about his dislike of golf, and finally tells her lover: “You’re boring me. I have a husband. I don’t feel the need for another.”

What does bother me is the self-conscious “art” that Brooks allows into his film. It does not mix with the actual events. The music on the sound track, for example, is almost conventional Hollywood spook music, as if these murders had to be made convincing. The sounds of the landscape—the wind and weather—would have been music enough. Again some of the photography is staged and distracting. We see Herb Clutter shaving, and fade to one of the killers shaving. We see Perry’s bus transform itself into a Santa Fe train passing through Holcomb. Gimmicks like this belong in TV commercials.

Gus Grissom, one of the three astronauts killed in the launch-pad fire, earlier told John Young he doubted the safety of the wiring in the 100-percent oxygen atmosphere of the capsule but didn’t dare complain because he might be booted out of the program for a negative attitude.

I grew up in Urbana three houses down from the Sanderson family—Milton and Virginia and their boys, Steve and Joe. My close friend was Joe. His bedroom was filled with aquariums, terrariums, snakes, hamsters, spiders, and butterfly and beetle collections. I envied him like crazy. After college he hit the road. He never made a break from his parents, but they rarely knew where he was. Sometimes he came home and his mother would have to sew $100 bills into the seams of his blue jeans. He disappeared in Nicaragua. His body was later identified as a dead Sandinista freedom fighter. From a nice little house surrounded by evergreens at the other end of Washington Street, he left to look for something he needed to find. I believe in Sean Penn’s Christopher McCandless. I grew up with him.

This is the first feature in ten years from Werner Herzog, one of the great visionaries among directors. He strains to break the bonds of film structure in order to surprise us in unexpected ways. His best films unashamedly yearn to lift us into the mythical and the mystical. “Our civilization is starving for new images,” he once told me, and in Invincible there is an image of a bleak, rocky seashore where the sharp stones are littered with thousands or millions of bright red crabs, all mindlessly scrabbling away on their crabby missions. I think this scene may represent the emerging Nazi hordes, but of course there can be no literal translation: Perhaps Herzog wants to illustrate the implacable Darwinian struggle from which man can rise with good heart and purpose.

The girl is fourteen, very ripe for her age, self-centered and secretive. The boy is nineteen, into motorcycles, leather jackets, and ducktail haircuts. He begins their relationship by seducing her, hardly suspecting that his moment of triumph in an empty barn represents the end of his autonomy. His will is no match for her own. And whatever has been going on in that strange, repressed family of hers will eventually lead to his destruction.

Kurosawa made this film after a decade of personal travail. Although he is often considered the greatest living Japanese director, he was unable to find financial backing in Japan when he first tried to make Kagemusha. He made a smaller film, Dodeskaden, which was not successful. He tried to commit suicide, but failed. He was backed by the Russians and went to Siberia to make the beautiful Dersu Uzala (1976), about a man of the wilderness. But Kagemusha remained his obsession, and he was finally able to make it only when Hollywood directors Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas helped him find U.S. financing.

Kurosawa seems to be saying that great human endeavors (in this case, samurai wars) depend entirely on large numbers of men sharing the same fantasies or beliefs. It is entirely unimportant, he seems to be suggesting, whether or not the beliefs are based on reality—all that matters is that men accept them.

There are great images in this film: Of a breathless courier clattering down countless steps, of men passing in front of a blood-red sunset, of a dying horse on a battlefield. But Kurosawa’s last image—of the dying kagemusha floating in the sea, swept by tidal currents past the fallen standard of the Takeda clan—summarizes everything: ideas and men are carried along heedlessly by the currents of time, and historical meaning seems to emerge when both happen to be swept in the same way at the same time.

Kill Bill: Volume 1 shows Quentin Tarantino so effortlessly and brilliantly in command of his technique that he reminds me of a virtuoso violinist racing through “Flight of the Bumble Bee”—or maybe an accordion prodigy setting a speed record for “Lady of Spain.” I mean that as a sincere compliment. The movie is not about anything at all except the skill and humor of its making. It’s kind of brilliant.

You can sense Tarantino grinning a little as each fresh victim, filled with foolish bravado, steps forward to be slaughtered. Someone has to win in a fight to the finish, and as far as the martial arts genre is concerned, it might as well be the heroine.

The movie is a distillation of the countless grind house kung-fu movies Tarantino has absorbed, and which he loves beyond all reason. Web sites have already enumerated his inspirations—how a sunset came from this movie, and a sword from that. He isn’t copying, but transcending; there’s a kind of urgency in the film, as if he’s turning up the heat under his memories.

We see him at work, herding sheep to their deaths, then stringing them up on a conveyor belt, cutting their throats, watching them bleed. Later, he throws away their inner parts. It is a hard and horrible job. Is there a connection between the sheep, who are content before their ends, and the children at play, happy because they know no better, unaware of the dead end that poverty will bring to some (not all!) of them?

Describing a comedy is always a risky business; the bare plot outline is, of course, no hint as to how funny a film is, and to steal the jokes is a misdemeanor.

If Francois drives Pomme to sadness, silence, and disorientation, he does so at great cost to himself because, in ways he doesn’t understand and may never understand, he’s lost a person who really was precious to him—lost her through convincing himself he wanted a girl different than the one he fell in love with.

He wants desperately (if “desperately” isn’t too strong a word for such a taciturn character) to break the mold of his life, and since the resistance won’t have him, he joins the local Gestapo. Now he gets to carry a gun (even a machine gun), and he has money in his pocket. It’s a good job, as jobs go. He doesn’t seem, at first, or even afterward, to have given much thought to the moral issues involved. He doesn’t see himself as a traitor to France, or a collaborator with the evil of Nazism, but as a person of some consequence through his power to order and bully. He likes the work.

This is crazy, we’re thinking. Lucien joins the Gestapo almost absentmindedly, and then this bright Jewish girl falls for a guy like that. But Malle’s point is a complex one. Neither of these people can quite see beyond their immediate circumstances. They’re young, uninformed, and naive, and the fact is that adolescent sex appeal is a great deal more meaningful to them than all the considerations of history.

The Last Emperor ends with an extraordinary sequence, beyond the end, in which an elderly Pu Yi goes to visit the Forbidden City, which is now open to tourists. He sneaks past the velvet rope and climbs onto the Dragon Throne. Once that would have been a fatal offense. And the old man who was once the boy on that throne experiences a complex mixture of emotions.

The weatherman is named Harris K. Telemacher (Martin), and he specializes in goofy weather reports that have little connection with actual climatic conditions. He makes enough money at his job to move in an affluent circle of beautiful people who seem prepared to sit in the sunshine ordering cappucino for the rest of their lives. Then Telemacher is fired, and discovers that his mistress (Marilu Henner) is having an affair, and with relief and a certain feeling of freedom he walks out of the relationship and takes stock of his life, inspired by the sentient highway sign.

All three are owned by Sam the Lion, who is just about the only self-sufficient and self-satisfied man in town. The others are infected by a general malaise, and engage in sexual infidelities partly to remind themselves they are alive. There isn’t much else to do in Anarene, no dreams worth dreaming, no new faces, not even a football team that can tackle worth a damn. The nourishing myth of the Western (Wagonmaster and Red River are among the last offerings at the Royal) is being replaced by nervously hilarious TV programs out of the East, and defeated housewives are reassured they’re part of the Strike It Rich audience with a heart of gold.

The movie begins when Jeanne, who is about to be married, goes apartment-hunting and finds Paul in one of the apartments. It is a big, empty apartment, with a lot of sunlight but curiously little cheer. Paul rapes her, if rape is not too strong a word to describe an act so casually accepted by the girl. He tells her that they will continue to meet there, in the empty apartment, and she agrees. Why does she agree? From her point of view—which is not a terribly perceptive one—why not?

Scorsese and Schrader have not made a film that panders to the audience—as almost all Hollywood religious epics traditionally have. They have paid Christ the compliment of taking him and his message seriously, and have made a film that does not turn him into a garish, emasculated image from a religious postcard. Here he is flesh and blood, struggling, questioning, asking himself and his father which is the right way, and finally, after great suffering, earning the right to say, on the cross, “It is accomplished.”

Piaf. The French word for “sparrow.” She was named by her first impresario, Louis Leplee. He was found shot dead not long after—possibly by a pimp who considered her his property. She stood four feet, eight inches tall, and so became “the Little Sparrow.” She was the most famous and beloved French singer of her time—of the twentieth century, in fact—and her lovers included Yves Montand (whom she discovered) and the middleweight champion Marcel Cerdan. She drank too much, all the time. She became addicted to morphine and required ten injections a day. She grew old and prematurely stooped, and died at forty-seven.

Mike Figgis, who wrote, directed, and composed the music, is a filmmaker attracted to the far shores of behavior. Here he began with a novel by a man named John O’Brien, whose autobiographical sources can be guessed by the information that he killed himself two weeks after selling the book rights.

In a café, he meets a woman he does business with. He mentions the baby. She tells him, “People pay to adopt.” Promising Sonia to watch the baby for an afternoon, he arranges to sell the child. Bruno lives in a grim world of unfriendly streets; he and Sonia have spent nights huddled on a river bank. But no place in the movie is bleaker than the empty building where the sale of the child takes place. He never sees the buyers. They never see him. The child is left in a room, is taken, the money left behind. He returns to Sonia and proudly shows her the money (“This is ours!”). When she despairingly asks about the baby, he says, “We can have another one.” She faints dead away and is taken to the hospital. This is a surprise to him.

This title begins a hilarious scene, as Michelangelo sits in a movie house (Godard always manages to work the movies into his movies). A woman appears on screen and begins to take a bath. Enraptured, Michelangelo leaps onto the stage to look into the tub. We laugh at his delusion that a movie is real, and in laughing we demonstrate the same delusion.

And then the movie’s long middle section functions almost as a documentary of the Beverly Hills fast track, of private clubs that open at midnight, of expensive cars and smooth drug dealers and glamorous hangers-on, and the quiet desperation of a society of once-bright, once-attractive, once-promising young people who talk about a lot of things but essentially think only about cocaine.

Schrader knows this world of insomnia, craving, and addiction. And he knows all about people living in a cocoon of themselves. Light Sleeper is the third in his trilogy about alienated night workers, after Taxi Driver (he wrote the screenplay, Martin Scorsese directed) and American Gigolo, about a man who supplies sex at great cost to himself. Now comes this story about the man who delivers drugs. There are many parallels in the three films; all involve the men in misguided efforts to save or connect with a self-destructive woman, and all end in violence. But, perhaps because he is growing older and wiser, the characters over the years have become better people. The zombie craziness in Travis Bickle, the De Niro character in Taxi Driver (1976), has mellowed into a certain gentle resignation in Willem Dafoe’s gifted portrait of John LeTour in Light Sleeper.

All the events happened long, long ago, and they’re related by a 121-year-old man who just wants to pass the story along. The yarn is the most flexible of story forms. Its teller can pause to repeat a point; he can hurry ahead ten years; he can forget an entire epoch in remembering the legend of a single man. He doesn’t capture the history of a time, but its flavor. Little Big Man gives us the flavor of the Cheyenne nation before white men brought uncivilization to the West.

Arkin said, shortly after the film was released, that he’d seen his movie only once in a theater, and he was afraid to go again. When he saw it with an audience, he said, he thought it was a flop because there was no pattern to the laughs. People were laughing as individuals, almost uneasily, as specific things in the movie touched or clobbered them. That’s my feeling about Little Murders. One of the reasons it works, and is indeed a definitive reflection of America’s darker moods, is that it breaks audiences down into isolated individuals, vulnerable and uncertain.

This stretch of the movie—Patsy’s courtship of Alfred—contains some awfully interesting ideas about the materialistic society. It seems to be saying that city life has cut its characters off from simple human emotion, and they’ve forgotten how to love or be sorry. Sharp, intense experiences can still penetrate the shell: sex, pain, getting fired. But the gentler emotions have atrophied. Consumer buying power, however, may be a form of salvation. City dwellers can set out on self-improvement programs designed to restore their emotional muscles. By vacationing at expensive resorts, eating in intimate restaurants, possessing fashionable artifacts, people may actually be able to learn (from objects!) how to be people.

He doesn’t fine a shred of evidence that Dreyman is disloyal. Not even in whispers. Not even in guarded allusions. Not even during pillow talk. The man obviously believes in the East German version of socialism, and the implication is that not even the Stasi can believe that. They are looking for dissent and subversion because, in a way, they think a man like Dreyman should be guilty of them. Perhaps they do not believe in East Germany themselves, but have simply chosen to play for the winning team.

Brooks quits, and a few scenes later, he and his wife (Julie Hagerty) are tooling the big Winnebago into Las Vegas. They have enough money, he conservatively estimates, to stay on the road for the rest of their lives. That’s before she loses their nest egg at the roulette tables.

When I saw the movie for the first time at Telluride, I noticed a curious thing about the audience. During most nude scenes involving women, men are silent and intent. During this scene, which was not focused on sexuality but on an actual female body, attractive but imperfect, it was the women who leaned forward in rapt attention. Nicole Holofcener, who wrote and directed Lovely and Amazing, is onto something: Her movie knows how these women relate to men, to each other, to their bodies, and to their prospects of happiness.

Why did Polanski choose to make Macbeth, and why this Macbeth? I have no way of guessing. This is certainly one of the most pessimistic films ever made, and there seems little doubt that Polanski intended his film to be full of sound and fury—which it is, to the brim—and to signify nothing. It’s at that level that Polanski is at his most adamant: The events that occur in the film must not be allowed to have significance. Polanski and Tynan take only small liberties with Shakespeare, and yet so successfully does Polanski orchestrate Macbeth’s visual content that we come out of the film with a horrified realization. We didn’t identify with either Macbeth or Macduff in their final duel. We were just watching a sword-fight.

Romance would be a possibility, except that romance is not a possibility in Ahmad’s life. It is too filled with the making of a living. Like so many Americans who work low-wage jobs, sometimes two or even three of them, his work essentially subsidizes his ability to keep on working.

Nicolas Cage is accused of showboating, but I prefer to think he swings for the fences. Sometimes he strikes out (Gone in 60 Seconds), but more often he connects (he took enormous risks in Leaving Las Vegas, Bringing Out the Dead, and Adaptation). He has a kind of raging zeal that possesses his characters; what in another actor would be overacting is, with Cage, a kind of fearsome intensity.

Me and You and Everyone We Know is a balancing act, as July ventures into areas that are risky and transgressive, but uses a freshness that disarms them, a directness that accepts human nature and likes to watch it at work. The MPAA gave it an R rating “for disturbing sexual content involving children,” but the one thing it isn’t is disturbing. When the movie was over at Sundance, I let out my breath and looked across the aisle at another critic. I wanted to see if she felt how I did. “What did you think?” she said. “I think it’s the best film at the festival,” I said. “Me too,” she said.

The movie’s scenes of violence are especially effective because of the way Scorsese stages them. We don’t get spectacular effects and skillfully choreographed struggles. Instead, there’s something realistically clumsy about the fights in this movie. A scene in a pool hall, in particular, is just right in the way it shows its characters fighting and yet mindful of their suits (possibly the only suits they have). The whole movie feels like life in New York; there are scenes in a sleazy nightclub, on fire escapes, and in bars, and they all feel as if Scorsese has been there.

Even five years ago, most Hollywood movies insisted on stopping at B on their way from A to C. Directors were driven by a fierce compulsion to explain how the characters got out of that train and up to the top of the mountain. And so their movies crept along slowly, and we spent so much time climbing the mountain that we didn’t give a damn what happened when we finally got there. But a movie named The Graduate didn’t bother with that. For years, underground and experimental films had stopped using the in-between steps. But now, here was one of the biggest commercial movies of all time, and when Benjamin plunged onto the prone form of Mrs. Robinson, there was a cut in mid-action to Benjamin landing belly-down on a rubber raft in a swimming pool. And no one had to explain why Mrs. Robinson turned into a raft, or how Benjamin got into the pool.

The actor is played by Klaus Maria Brandauer in one of the greatest movie performances I’ve ever seen. The character, Henrik, is not sympathetic, and yet we identify with him because he shares so many of our own weaknesses and fears. Henrik is not a very good actor or a very good human being, but he is good enough to get by in ordinary times. As the movie opens, he’s a socialist, interested in all the most progressive new causes, and is even the proud lover of a black woman. By the end of the film, he has learned that his liberalism was a taste, not a conviction, and that he will do anything, flatter anybody, make any compromise, just to hear applause, even though he knows the applause comes from fools.

If a camera could somehow be transported to another planet, there to photograph alien life forms, would the result be any more astonishing than these invasions into the private lives of snails and bees, mantises and beetles, spiders and flies?

The Dafoe character approaches a black man in a segregated luncheonette and asks him questions. The black refuses to talk to him—and still gets beaten by the Klan. Sometimes keeping your mouth shut can be sound common sense. Parker has dealt with intimidating bullies before in his work, most notably in Midnight Express, but what makes this film so particular is the way he understates the evil in it. There are no great villains and sadistic torturers in this film, only banal little racists with a vicious streak.

Although she kills for the first time in self-defense, she is also lashing out against her past. Her experience of love with Selby brings revulsion uncoiling from her memories; men treat her in a cruel way and pay for their sins and those of all who went before them. The most heartbreaking scene is the death of a good man (Scott Wilson) who actually wants to help her, but has arrived so late in her life that the only way he can help is to be eliminated as a witness.

Montenegro is the first movie in seven years from Dusan Makavejev, one of the great free spirits of moviemaking in our time. He does not see it as a protest against the exploitation of his poor countrymen who immigrate to northern Europe in search of jobs. Quite the contrary. He believes that his life-embracing countrymen are doing the uptight Swedes a favor by condescending to live in their dull country. At one point, Makavejev says, he intended to dedicate Montenegro to the 11 million “guest workers” of Europe, “who moved north to exploit rich and prosperous people, bringing with them filthy habits, bad manners, and the smell of garlic.”

They are married and have two children, and she is pregnant with a third, in the Depression year of 1932, when government troops round her up with tens of thousands of other Mexican-Americans (most of them, like Maria, U.S. citizens) and ship them in cattle cars to central Mexico, hoping they will never return.

What do we remember from our childhoods? If we are lucky, we recall the security of family rituals, our admiration for our parents, and the bittersweet partings with things we love. Childhood ends, in a sense, the day we discover that summer does not last forever.

Bluto and his brothers are engaged in a holding action against civilization. They are in favor of beer, women, song, motorcycles, Playboy centerfolds, and making rude noises. They are opposed to studying, serious thought, the dean, the regulations governing fraternities, and, most especially, the disgusting behavior of the Omegas—a house so respectable it has even given an ROTC commander to the world.