Roger Ebert's Four Star Reviews, 1967-2007

by Roger Ebert

You know, for example, that this jolly appliance salesman was the famed Colonel Gaspar, hero of the Resistance. That a local public relations man was so impressed by the Third Reich that he signed up with a company of French volunteers and went off to wear the German uniform and fight the Russians. And that a weathered old farmer who fought for the underground knows which of his neighbors turned him in to the Nazis, but doesn’t much care. “What can be done about it at this late date?” he says, sighing, sitting at his kitchen table surrounded by his family, his friends, and several bottles of the excellent regional wine. His remark is one of the most haunting in the whole four-and-a-half-hour length of this remarkable documentary, because he seems to be speaking for so many of the survivors of the Nazi occupation of France, on both sides. Their passions were high and their loyalties were fierce, and many of them were killed, tortured, or imprisoned. And yet, thirty years later, they seem to share a kind of intellectual exhaustion on the subject.

Ophuls makes it clear that the majority of Frenchmen were neither supporters of the Germans nor members of the Resistance. Instead, they went along rather quietly with the wartime collaborationist government of Petain and Laval. The movie makes the point that France was the only nation that actually collaborated during the war and that de Gaulle’s “Free French” in London were in the embarrassing position of not being a government-in-exile, because France’s government remained in residence. Those who “went along” did so not because they were lacking in patriotism or moral backbone but because it seemed the thing to do. Ophuls has pointed out in an interview that the establishment tends to remain the establishment, no matter what. To be in the Resistance, he speculates, “you had to be a misfit, one who wouldn’t go along,” and this is a point the movie makes.

Some screenwriters study Robert McKee. Mamet studies magic and confidence games. In his plots, the left hand makes a distracting movement, but you’re too smart for that, and you quickly look over at the right hand to spot the trick, while meantime the left hand does the business while still seeming to flap around like a decoy.

There is always an animal on the raft to keep the monk company (the dog is glimpsed only briefly at the beginning). The monk feeds them, pets the cat because it is the requirement of cats to be petted, and otherwise simply shares the space, as he does with his student. The lake, the raft, the house, the animals, the forest are there for them, and will be there after them, and the monk accepts the use of them.

Star Wars is a fairytale, a fantasy, a legend, finding its roots in some of our most popular fictions. The golden robot, lion-faced space pilot, and insecure little computer on wheels must have been suggested by the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. The journey from one end of the galaxy to another is out of countless thousands of space operas. The hardware is from Flash Gordon out of 2001, the chivalry is from Robin Hood, the heroes are from Westerns, and the villains are a cross between Nazis and sorcerers. Star Wars taps the pulp fantasies buried in our memories, and because it’s done so brilliantly, it reactivates old thrills, fears, and exhilarations we thought we’d abandoned when we read our last copy of Amazing Stories.

The little boy is named Jose. He lives with his grandmother, a vast, hardworking, God-fearing woman with a great fund of love. He is a smart kid—gifted, likable. He makes friends with a very old man, a man so old that he remembers the days of slavery, and tells Jose that the work in the fields is just a new form of slavery. He dreams of going back to Africa someday, and Jose says he’ll join him.

It’s here that the movie begins to venture into philosophical and sexual mischief-making, because although Wertmuller is a leftist, she is not, apparently, a feminist. She seems to be trying to tell us two things through the episodes on the island: (1) that once the corrupt facade of capitalism is stripped away, it’s the worker, with the sweat of his back, who deserves to reap the benefit of his own labor, and (2) that woman is an essentially masochistic and submissive creature who likes nothing better than being swept off her feet by a strong and lustful male. This is a notion feminists have spent the past ten years trying to erase from our collective fantasies, and it must be unsettling, to say the least, to find the foremost female director making a whole movie out of it. And Wertmuller doesn’t kid around: Her shipwrecked couple gradually work their way into a sadomasochistic relationship that makes The Night Porter look positively restrained. The more the woman submits, the more ecstasy she finds—until finally she’s offending the hapless Sicilian by suggesting practices he can’t even pronounce.

Syriana is an endlessly fascinating movie about oil and money, America and China, traders and spies, the Persian Gulf states and Texas, reform and revenge, bribery and betrayal. Its interlocking stories come down to one thing: There is less oil than the world requires, and that will make some people rich and others dead.

This turned out to be false. Population declines in the developed world (and the third of the developing world that is China) are cutting down oil use quite a bit. I'm amazed the propaganda in 2005 was so strong. Pat Buchanan was predicting this back in 2001.

If you commit yourself to this epic experience, leave your watch at home. This is a long, slow film. There is no narrator imparting breathless banalities. No cute reaction shots of grinning children or wrinkled grannies. No lovable puppies. No clichés about the simple nobility of these ancient tribes. No documentary packaging. Ottinger was invited into the lives of these peoples, and she stayed a long time, watching and listening, and then she made a film about what she saw and heard. That is worth doing, and worth seeing.

Like part 1, this section of the film proceeds at its own pace, inviting us into lives so different from our own—sharing the same hopes for children and family, the same desire for comfort and security, in an almost unimaginable environment. I will remember the words of the old man as he and his wife bid farewell to the film crew. We see them standing outside their yurt, ready to resume six years of complete isolation and backbreaking labor. He says, “Our life is neither good nor bad, although we did expect a bit more.”

Ripley, at this point still developing the skills that will carry him through several more adventures, instinctively knows that the best way to lie is to admit to lying, and to tell the truth whenever convenient. When Dickie asks him what his talents are, he replies, “Forging signatures, telling lies, and impersonating almost anyone.” Quite true. And then he does a chilling impersonation of Mr. Greenleaf asking him to bring Dickie back to America. “I feel like he’s here,” Dickie says, as Tom does his father’s voice. By confessing his mission, Tom disarms Dickie, and is soon accepted into his circle, which also includes an epicurean friend named Freddie Miles (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Also moving through Europe at about the same time is a rich girl named Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett), who believes things about Tom that Dickie must not be allowed to know. But I am growing vague, and must grow vaguer, because the whole point of the movie is to show Tom Ripley learning to use subterfuge, improvisation, and lightning-fast thinking under pressure to become Dickie Greenleaf.

Humor, it is said, is universal. Most times it is not. The humor that travels best, I sometimes think, is not “universal” humor at all, but humor that grows so specifically out of one culture that it reaches other cultures almost by seeming to ignore them. The best British comedies were the very specifically British films like The Lavender Hill Mob and School for Scoundrels. The best Italian comedies were local products like Seduced and Abandoned. The funniest French films were by Tati, who seemed totally absorbed in himself. And this very, very Japanese movie, which seems to make no effort to communicate to other cultures, is universally funny almost for that reason. Who cannot identify with the search for the perfect noodle?

Erase the forced smiles from the desperate faces, and what the dance marathons of the 1930s came down to was fairly simple. A roomful of human beings went around and around within four walls for weeks at a time without sleep, populating a circus for others who paid to see them. At the end, those who didn’t collapse or drop dead won cash prizes that were good money during the Depression. And the Depression, in an oblique sort of way, was the reason for it all. The marathons offered money to the winners and distraction to everyone else. To be sure, some of the marathons got pretty grim. Contestants tried to dance their way through illnesses and pregnancies, through lice and hallucinations, and the sight of them doing it was part of the show. Beyond the hit tunes and the crepe paper and the free pig as a door prize, there was an elementary sadism in the appeal of the marathons. Among American spectator sports, they rank with stock-car racing. There was always that delicious possibility, you see, that somebody would die. Or freak out. Or stand helplessly while his partner collapsed and he lost the investment of thousands of hours of his life.

The characters are comedians trapped in tragic roles. They signed up for the three square meals a day and the crack at the $1,500 prize, and they can stop (after all) whenever they want to. But somehow they can’t stop, and as the hundreds and thousands of hours of weariness and futility begin to accumulate, the great dance marathon begins to look more and more like life.

We meet Walker (John Turturro), a sardonic college professor, who walks out on his wife (Amy Irving) and begins an affair with a woman (Barbara Sukowa). She realizes that the affair is hardly the point: Walker is going through the motions because he has been told, and believes, that this is how you find happiness.

Let me tell you a story. Not long ago I was in the middle of a cheerful conversation when I slipped on wet wax, landed hard and broke bones in my left shoulder. I was in a fool’s paradise of happiness, you see, not realizing that I was working without a net—that in a second my happiness would be rudely interrupted. I could have hit my head and been killed. Or landed better and not been injured. At best what we can hope for is a daily reprieve from all of the things that can go wrong. Thirteen Conversations About One Thing is relentless in the way it demonstrates how little we control our lives. We can choose actions, but we cannot plan outcomes.

Movies tell narratives, and the purpose of narrative is to arrange events in an order that seems to make sense and end correctly. The Sprechers are telling us if we believe in these narratives we’re only fooling ourselves. And yet, even so, there is a way to find happiness. That is to be curious about all of the interlocking events that add up to our lives. To notice connections.

Note: This review applies to the French language version with English subtitles. A preview audience had the misfortune to see one of the worst, most distracting, most damaging jobs of dubbing I’ve ever endured. If Allied Artists has any hopes for this film, it should abandon the dubbed version and go with subtitles. In a film where nuance is so important, to remove the rhythms and inflections of the actor’s own voices is essentially castration.

Russell’s screenplay illustrates the difference between a great action picture and the others: The action grows out of the story, instead of the story being about the action.

Don Lope, a feisty middle-aged intellectual and atheist, sees his chance when the beautiful young Tristana (Catherine Deneuve) is orphaned. As the girl’s guardian, he takes her into his household and (in what seems like no time at all) into his bed. While ravishing her, he excuses himself by rationalizing that she’d fare worse on the streets.

Tron has been conceived and written with a knowledge of computers that it mercifully assumes the audience shares. That doesn’t mean we do share it, but that we’re bright enough to pick it up, and don’t have to sit through long, boring explanations of it.

Here is a movie that takes place within our memories of the movies. The characters and the mysteries and especially the doomed romances are all generated by old films, by remembered worlds of lurid neon signs and deserted areas down by the docks, of sad cafés where losers linger over a cup of coffee, and lonely rooms where the light bulb is a man’s only friend. This is a world for which the saxophone was invented, a world in which the American Motors Javelin was a popular car.

Tsotsi finds himself in an upscale suburb. Such areas in Joburg are usually gated communities, each house surrounded by a security wall, every gate promising “armed response.” An African professional woman gets out of her Mercedes to ring the buzzer on the gate so her husband can let her in. Tsotsi shoots her and steals her car.

The village is desperate for information about the coming American invasion. There is a scene of human comedy in which every household has a member up on a hill with a makeshift TV antenna; those below shout instructions: “To the left! A little to the right!” But no signal is received. Satellite announces that he will go to town and barter for a satellite dish. There is a sensation when he returns with one. The elders gather as he tries to bring in a signal. The sexy music video channels are prohibited, but the elders wait patiently as Satellite cycles through the sin until he finds CNN, and they can listen for English words they understand. They hate Saddam and eagerly await the Americans. But what will the Americans do for them? The plight of the Kurdish people is that no one seems to want to do much for them.

From time to time the aims of the Kurds come into step with the aims of others. When they were fighting Saddam, the first Bush administration supported them. When they were fighting our ally Turkey, we opposed them. The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story about Ibrahim Parlak, who for ten years peacefully ran a Kurdish restaurant in Harbert, Michigan, only to be arrested in 2004 by the federal government, which hoped to deport him for Kurdish nationalist activities that at one point we approved. Because I supported Ibrahim’s case, I could read headlines on right-wing sites such as, “Roger Ebert Gives Thumbs Up to Terrorism.”

Some of Kubrick’s effects have been criticized as tedious. Perhaps they are, but I can understand his motives. If his space vehicles move with agonizing precision, wouldn’t we have laughed if they’d zipped around like props on Captain Video? This is how it would really be, you find yourself believing.

The film will be noticed primarily for its eroticism. Although major films and filmmakers considered sex with great frankness and freedom in the early and mid-seventies, films in the last decade have been more adolescent, more plot- and action-oriented. Catering to audiences of adolescents, who are comfortable with sex only when it is seen in cartoon form, Hollywood has also not been comfortable with the complications of adult sexuality—the good and the bad. What is remarkable about The Unbearable Lightness of Being, however, is not the sexual content itself, but the way Kaufman has been able to use it as an avenue for a complex story, one of nostalgia, loss, idealism, and romance.

unlike the new violent urban adventures, Westerns place greater weight on the meaning of gunfights and deaths. They aren’t simply stunts, providing a moment of activity before being quickly forgotten.

Eastwood’s direction of the film, with cinematography by Jack Green, doesn’t make the West seem particularly scenic. A lot of the shots are from the inside looking out, so that the figures seem dark and obscure and the brightness that pours through the window is almost blinding. The effect is to diminish the stature of the characters; these aren’t heroes, but simply the occupants of a simple, rude society in which death is an everyday fact.

But why are you reading this far? An Indian film? Starring Mamatha Bhukya and Urmila Dammannagari? Lesser readers would already have tuned out, but you are curious. And so I can promise you that here is a very special film. It was made by the director as part of his master’s thesis in the film department at Columbia University, shot over a period of years on a $20,000 budget, and all I can say is, $20,000 buys a lot in India, including a great-looking, extraordinary film.

Is the India-born Mira Nair a strange choice to adapt what some think is the best English novel of the nineteenth century? Not at all. She has an instinctive feel for the comic possibilities of marital alliances, as she showed in her wonderful Monsoon Wedding (2001). And she brings to the movie an awareness of the role India played in the English imagination; in the nineteenth century, hardly a well-born family lacked relatives serving or living in India, and wasn’t it Orwell who said the two nations deserved each other, because they shared the same love of eccentricity?

It would take a film historian to evaluate the dozens—hundreds?—of times Hollywood has marshaled casts of thousands and budgets of millions to create yet another epoch-shattering spectacular. There were the pioneering epics, such as Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. There were the epics that made it, such as Spartacus, and the ones that didn’t, such as Cleopatra. There was blood and thunder in Ben-Hur, beauty and romance in Doctor Zhivago, Charlton Heston in half of them, Peter Ustinov in the rest, Rome falling daily, slaves rising weekly, wars won at least once a month, and several miracles a year from Cecil B. DeMille. Like Westerns and gangster movies, epics almost always were made by Hollywood. What other nation had the means to spend $44 million on Cleopatra—even if it was a flop? What happened, though, was that Cleopatra brought an end to the epic budget race. If you couldn’t make it for $11 million (Spartacus) or $14 million (2001) or even $19 million (Dr. Zhivago), then perhaps you shouldn’t make it at all.

By now the statistics regarding War and Peace are well known, but forgive me if I recite them with a certain relish anyway: The film was five years in the making at a cost of $100 million, with a cast of one hundred twenty thousand, all clothed in authentic uniforms, and the Red Army was mobilized to re-create Napoleon’s battles exactly (it is claimed) as they happened. The prestige of the Soviet film industry rested on War and Peace for half a decade, and the result looks like it. You are never, ever going to see anything to equal it.

A doctor explains that victims with burns on more than 50 percent of their bodies are being put in a “holding section” to die without drugs. The drugs are needed for those who might live. As a means of identification, wedding rings are taken from the dead. They fill a bucket. These sections are certainly the most horrifying ever put on film (although, to be sure, greater suffering has taken place in real life, and is taking place today).

Dawn lives in a split-level house with an older brother who is a nerd, and a younger sister who is a ballerina. Her parents claim they love all of their children equally. They are lying. Her brother, Mark (Matthew Faber), is focused on getting into a good college, and everything he does is planned to enrich his application. He starts a garage band and recruits a popular student named Steve (Eric Mabius) as his lead singer. Steve is a mature, handsome hunk, and Dawn gets weak-kneed just looking at him. He’s the kind of guy who will break a woman’s heart just for the pleasure of hearing it snap, but of course Dawn’s heart is far beneath his attention. Nor is he much interested in the band. (“That doesn’t sound much like ‘Satisfaction,’” he notes, after a clarinet passage by Mark.) Dawn is very badly informed about sex but willing to learn. She will essentially do anything for Steve, who can’t be bothered; there is a well-written scene in which she has him alone at home and plies him with junk food.

The movie begins with a woman who is living a sort of dead life. Her name is Jean Travers (played by Vanessa Redgrave); she was once in love with a young man who went off to fight the war and was killed. He was not killed gloriously, but stupidly, while getting involved in someone else’s drunken quarrel, but he was dead all the same.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? makes of these materials an enchanting story of people who aren’t misfits only because they don’t see themselves that way. Nor does the film take them with tragic seriousness; it is a problem, yes, to have a retarded younger brother. And it is a problem to have a mother so fat she never leaves the house. But when kids from the neighborhood sneak around to peek at the fat lady in the living room, Gilbert sometimes gives them a boost up to the window. What the hell.

The movie is filled with throwaway gags, inside jokes, one-liners, and little pokes at the screen images of its cartoon characters. It is also oddly convincing, not only because of the craft of the filmmakers, but also because Hoskins and the other live actors have found the right note for their interaction with the Toons. Instead of overreacting or playing up their emotions cartoon-style, Hoskins and the others adopt a flat, realistic, matter-of-fact posture toward the Toons. They act as if they’ve been talking to animated rabbits for years.

Kids are not stupid. They are among the sharpest, cleverest, most eagle-eyed creatures on God’s Earth, and very little escapes their notice. You may not have observed that your neighbor is still using his snow tires in mid-July, but every four-year-old on the block has, and kids pay the same attention to detail when they go to the movies. They don’t miss a thing, and they have an instinctive contempt for shoddy and shabby work. I make this observation because nine out often children’s movies are stupid, witless, and display contempt for their audiences, and that’s why kids hate them. Is that all parents want from kids’ movies? That they not have anything bad in them? Shouldn’t they have something good in them—some life, imagination, fantasy, inventiveness, something to tickle the imagination? If a movie isn’t going to do your kids any good, why let them watch it? Just to kill a Saturday afternoon? That shows a subtle kind of contempt for a child’s mind, I think.

The making of the film was a happy accident. I remember meeting the director, Michael Wadleigh, in an editing room up in a loft in New York City, months before the movie was released. He talked about how he and his partner, producer Bob Maurice, threw together a production team at the last moment, and descended on the Woodstock site because they had a hunch it might be more than just another rock concert. What they came away with was 120 miles of footage, which an editing team headed by Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese assembled into a three-hour film. The balance was perhaps 60 percent about the music and 40 percent about the event itself—about how four hundred thousand people were drawn to a farm in upstate New York, where the facilities could not remotely sustain or feed them, hand where a thunderstorm soaked them, but where somehow they celebrated, as the film’s subtitle has it, “three days of peace and music.”

Woodstock was made at a time before rock concerts were routinely filmed (although earlier documentaries about the Stones, Bob Dylan, and the Newport Jazz Festival pointed the way). The stars were not performing for the camera. Richie Havens casually stops in the middle of a set to tune his guitar. Sha-Na-Na does a cornball double-time version of “At the Hop” and doesn’t care how it looks. Joan Baez puts down her guitar and sings “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and nobody worries that it will slow down the show. Night follows day, day follows night, Hugh Romney of the Hog Farm announces, “What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000 people.” Army helicopters drop food, blankets, medical supplies—and flowers. Babies are born and no one is killed, and for a moment it seems that the spirit of Woodstock Nation could prevail.

The Year of Living Dangerously is a wonderfully complex film about personalities more than events, and we really share the feeling of living in that place, at that time. It does for Indonesia what Bogdanovich’s Saint Jack did for Singapore.

Brooks’s targets are James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the first the most influential and the second probably the best of the 1930s Hollywood horror movies.

A plot summary, describing who does what and with whom, would be pointless. The underlying truth is that no one cares for or about anybody else very much, and all of the fooling around is just an exercise in selfishness. The other day I spent a long time looking at the penguins in the Shedd Aquarium. Every once in a while two of them would square off into a squawking fit over which rock they were entitled to stand on. Big deal. Meanwhile, they’re helpless captives inside a system that has cut them off from their full natures, and they don’t even know it. Same thing in this movie.

This is a movie with the impact of the original stage production of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It has a similar form, but is more cruel and unforgiving than Carnal Knowledge. Mamet has written some stuff like this. It contains hardly any nudity and no physical violence, but the MPAA at first slapped it with an NC-17 rating, perhaps in an oblique tribute to its power (on appeal, it got an R). It’s the kind of date movie that makes you want to go home alone.

The movie is realistic about sex, which is to say, franker and healthier than the smutty evasions forced on American movies by the R rating. We feel a shock of recognition: This is what real people do and how they do it, sexually, and the MPAA has perverted a generation of American movies into puerile, masturbatory snickering.