Ebert's Bests

By Roger Ebert

A treasury of year-by-year ten-best lists, plus personal reminiscences by the man whose name became synonymous with the movies.
 
In Ebert’s Bests, the iconic Roger Ebert takes us through the journey of how he became a film critic, from his days at a student-run cinema club to his rise as a television commentator in At the Movies and Siskel & Ebert. Recounting the influence of the French New Wave; his friendships with Werner Herzog and Martin Scorsese; and travels to Sweden and Rome to visit Ingrid Bergman and Federico Fellini, Ebert never loses sight of film as a key component of our cultural identity. In considering the ethics of film criticism—why we should take all film seriously, without prejudgment or condescension—he argues that film critics ought always to engage in open-minded dialogue with a movie.
 
All this is accompanied by decades’ worth of annual ten-best lists, which showcase Roger Ebert’s  recommendations—while at the same time reminding us that hearts and minds, and even rankings, are bound to change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226048901

Book preview

Ebert’s Bests

Roger Ebert

Chicago Shorts

Ebert’s Bests comes from a selection from Awake in the Dark by Roger Ebert and from rogerebert.com, © 2006 by The Ebert Company, Ltd., and © 2012 by rogerebert.com

All rights reserved.

Chicago Shorts edition, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-226-04890-1

CONTENTS

Becoming a Film Critic

The Best—Some Introductory Words

Ten Best Lists, 1967–2011

Becoming a Film Critic

I began my work as a film critic in 1967. I had not thought to be a film critic, and indeed had few firm career plans apart from vague notions that I might someday be a political columnist or a professor of English. I came up to Chicago in September 1966 as a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, which was kind enough to accept me although I did not have my MA from the University of Illinois; I had fulfilled all of the requirements except the foreign language, which they assured me I could take care of during the first year. It was not that I could not learn French, but that I would not: I resisted memorizing and repeating, and there was something stubborn and unyielding in my refusal that had its origins, I suspect, in the tear-stained multiplication tables over which I was drilled in grade school. To read, to listen, to watch, and to learn came easily to me, but to memorize was a loathsome enterprise. I never did get a decent grade in French.

I had done some freelance book reviewing for the Chicago Daily News, and applied for a job there. Herman Kogan, the arts editor, forwarded my letter to James Hoge, city editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, who took me out to lunch with Ken Towers, his assistant. After a chicken sandwich at Riccardo’s I was hired as a feature writer on the paper’s Sunday supplement.

Today students are on a career path beginning almost in grade school, but I must truthfully say my only object in attending college was to take literature classes