The Great Movies
Roger Ebert
Language: English
Pages: 544
ISBN: 0767910389
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
America’s most trusted and best-known film critic Roger Ebert presents one hundred brilliant essays on some of the best movies ever made.
For the past five years Roger Ebert, the famed film writer and critic, has been writing biweekly essays for a feature called "The Great Movies," in which he offers a fresh and fervent appreciation of a great film. The Great Movies collects one hundred of these essays, each one of them a gem of critical appreciation and an amalgam of love, analysis, and history that will send readers back to that film with a fresh set of eyes and renewed enthusiasm–or perhaps to an avid first-time viewing. Ebert’s selections range widely across genres, periods, and nationalities, and from the highest achievements in film art to justly beloved and wildly successful popular entertainments. Roger Ebert manages in these essays to combine a truly populist appreciation for our most important form of popular art with a scholar’s erudition and depth of knowledge and a sure aesthetic sense. Wonderfully enhanced by stills selected by Mary Corliss, film curator at the Museum of Modern Art, The Great Movies is a treasure trove for film lovers of all persuasions, an unrivaled guide for viewers, and a book to return to again and again.
The Great Movies includes: All About Eve • Bonnie and Clyde • Casablanca • Citizen Kane • The Godfather • Jaws • La Dolce Vita • Metropolis • On the Waterfront • Psycho • The Seventh Seal • Sweet Smell of Success • Taxi Driver • The Third Man • The Wizard of Oz • and eighty-five more films.
From the Hardcover edition.
Unforgiven (BFI Modern Classics)
Sight & Sound [UK] (March 2016)
Film After Film: (Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?)
shot in the rain forest, also about an impossible task: a man who wants to physically move a steamship from one river system to another by dragging it across land. Of course Herzog literally dragged a real ship across land to make the film, despite urgent warnings by engineers that the cables would snap and slice everyone in half. A documentary about the shooting of that film, Burden of Dreams (1982), by Les Blank, is as harrowing as the film itself. [ T Ali: Fear E at s t h e S o u l ] he
enough, I think, to distract from the overall arc of the movie. The river journey sets the rhythm, and too much time on the banks interrupts it. Yet the sequence is effective and provoking (despite the inappropriate music during the love scene). It helps me to understand it when Coppola explains that he sees the French like ghosts; I questioned how they had survived in their little enclave, and accept his feeling that their spirits survive as a cautionary specter for the Americans. Longer or
insinuating). He’s 59 Belle de Jour also turned on by her virtue—by her blond perfection, her careful grooming, her reserve, her icy disdain for him. “Keep your compliments to yourself,” she says when she and Pierre have lunch with him at a resort. Her secret is that she has a wild fantasy life, and Buñuel cuts between her enigmatic smile and what she is thinking. Buñuel celebrated his own fetishes, always reserving a leading role in his films for feet and shoes, and he understood that
camera moves straight up to a catwalk high above the stage, and one stagehand turns to another and eloquently reviews her performance by holding his nose. Only the stage and the stagehands on the catwalk are real. The middle portion of this seemingly unbroken shot is a miniature, built in the RKO model workshop. The model is invisibly wiped in by the stage curtains, as we move up past them, and wiped out by a wooden beam right below the catwalk. Another example: In Walter Thatcher’s library, the
view,” but you are definitely old enough to react to one. For the whole movie, you’d been seeing almost everything through the eyes of E.T. or Elliot. By the last moments, you were identifying with E.T. And whom did he miss the most? Whom did he want to see standing in the spaceship door for him? His mommy. E .T. Of course maybe Steven Spielberg didn’t see it the same way, and thought E.T. only seemed like a kid and was really five hundred years old. That doesn’t matter, because Spielberg left
