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Roger Ebert's Book of Film: From Tolstoy to Tarantino, the Finest Writing From a Century of Film
Thumbs up for the most lavish and entertaining anthology of writing on film ever, assembled by America's best known and most trusted movie critic. If going to the movies has been the twentieth century's most popular source of artistic pleasure, reading about the movies may not be far behind. For this delicious, instructive, and vastly enjoyable anthology, Roger Ebert has selected and introduced an international treasury of more than 100 selections that touch on every aspect of filmmaking and filmgoing. Here are the stars (Truman Capote on Marilyn Monroe, Joan Didion on John Wayne, Tom Wolfe on Cary Grant, Lauren Bacall on herself), the directors (John Houseman on Orson Welles, Kenneth Tynan on Mel Brooks, John Huston on himself), the makers and shakers (producer Julia Phillips, mogul Daryll F. Zanuck, stuntman Joe Bonomo), and the critics and theorists (Pauline Kael, Graham Greene, Andrew Sarris, Susan Sontag). Here as well are the novelists who have indelibly captured the experience of moviegoing in our lives (Walker Percy, James Agee, Larry McMurtry) and the culture of the movie business (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Budd Schulberg, Nathanael West). Here is a book to get lost in and return to time and time againat once a history, an anatomy, and a loving appreciation of the central art form of our time.
800 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 1996
21 people are currently reading
1156 people want to read
About the author
Roger Ebert
91 books405 followersRoger Joseph Ebert was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American film critic and screenwriter.
He was known for his weekly review column (appearing in the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967, and later online) and for the television program Siskel & Ebert at the Movies, which he co-hosted for 23 years with Gene Siskel. After Siskel's death in 1999, he auditioned several potential replacements, ultimately choosing Richard Roeper to fill the open chair. The program was retitled Ebert & Roeper and the Movies in 2000.
Ebert's movie reviews were syndicated to more than 200 newspapers in the United States and abroad. He wrote more than 15 books, including his annual movie yearbook. In 1975, Ebert became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. His television programs have also been widely syndicated, and have been nominated for Emmy awards. In February 1995, a section of Chicago's Erie Street near the CBS Studios was given the honorary name Siskel & Ebert Way. Ebert was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in June 2005, the first professional film critic to receive one. Roger Ebert was named as the most influential pundit in America by Forbes Magazine, beating the likes of Bill Maher, Lou Dobbs, and Bill O'Reilly.[2] He has honorary degrees from the University of Colorado, the American Film Institute, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
From 1994 until his death in 2013, he wrote a Great Movies series of individual reviews of what he deemed to be the most important films of all time. He also hosted the annual Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival in Champaign, Illinois from 1999 until his death.
He was known for his weekly review column (appearing in the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967, and later online) and for the television program Siskel & Ebert at the Movies, which he co-hosted for 23 years with Gene Siskel. After Siskel's death in 1999, he auditioned several potential replacements, ultimately choosing Richard Roeper to fill the open chair. The program was retitled Ebert & Roeper and the Movies in 2000.
Ebert's movie reviews were syndicated to more than 200 newspapers in the United States and abroad. He wrote more than 15 books, including his annual movie yearbook. In 1975, Ebert became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. His television programs have also been widely syndicated, and have been nominated for Emmy awards. In February 1995, a section of Chicago's Erie Street near the CBS Studios was given the honorary name Siskel & Ebert Way. Ebert was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in June 2005, the first professional film critic to receive one. Roger Ebert was named as the most influential pundit in America by Forbes Magazine, beating the likes of Bill Maher, Lou Dobbs, and Bill O'Reilly.[2] He has honorary degrees from the University of Colorado, the American Film Institute, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
From 1994 until his death in 2013, he wrote a Great Movies series of individual reviews of what he deemed to be the most important films of all time. He also hosted the annual Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival in Champaign, Illinois from 1999 until his death.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
February 11, 2025
20 years have passed since this book's initial publication and Roger Ebert is no longer with us. Modern film has changed in many ways. Formulaic sequels and reboots are the preferred cash crop of elitist Hollywood.
Citizen Kane didn't make it into France until six years after its initial release.
There is a lot of reverence for Humphrey Bogart.
John Updike had a passionate love and admiration for Ted Williams. (152)
Any mention of the Lunts will always remind me of Holden Caulfield.
Joseph Medill Patterson's background info of nickelodeons in the early 1900s was interesting. About a third of the paying audience were attributed to children. (347-355)
Woody Allen's fantasy stage production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was a small window into a twisted creative mind.
Stanley Kubrick was very secretive about shooting films.
The two best parts were Truman Capote's adventure and interview with Marilyn Monroe (160-172) and Groucho Marx's written correspondence with Warner Brothers' legal department. (750-754)
Tarantino is more of an enigma now than he was in 1997.
Citizen Kane didn't make it into France until six years after its initial release.
There is a lot of reverence for Humphrey Bogart.
John Updike had a passionate love and admiration for Ted Williams. (152)
Any mention of the Lunts will always remind me of Holden Caulfield.
Joseph Medill Patterson's background info of nickelodeons in the early 1900s was interesting. About a third of the paying audience were attributed to children. (347-355)
Woody Allen's fantasy stage production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was a small window into a twisted creative mind.
Stanley Kubrick was very secretive about shooting films.
The two best parts were Truman Capote's adventure and interview with Marilyn Monroe (160-172) and Groucho Marx's written correspondence with Warner Brothers' legal department. (750-754)
Tarantino is more of an enigma now than he was in 1997.
July 17, 2007
roger ebert is my hero, in a few ways. he's a film critic, but what sets him apart from the others i've come across is his huge heart, his genuine love of all genres of film, and his eloquence in expressing those together. he understands film, in a more profound way than i ever will, but he brings me in. when i'm reading his essays, i understand film, too. and i love it almost as much as he.
this collection is more than essays, though. he's included interviews, memories of his own, and sections of film scripts, as well. he throws in various bits and pieces which have contributed to his ongoing love affair with the cinema.
after reading this collection, i fell in love a bit more, too. with the movies and roger, both.
this collection is more than essays, though. he's included interviews, memories of his own, and sections of film scripts, as well. he throws in various bits and pieces which have contributed to his ongoing love affair with the cinema.
after reading this collection, i fell in love a bit more, too. with the movies and roger, both.
May 25, 2025
Thank you, Rogert Ebert, for curating all these sketches, book excerpts, essays, and articles on the movies. And, much like a Venn diagram, a lot else within its tangential periphery. Thanks to this book, I am now likely to:
1) Read my copy of Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show.
2) Ditto my few books by Gore Vidal.
3) That goes for my chucked copy of Julia Phillips's You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again.
4) Read The Godfather again. Then watch the film, yet again.
5) Watch Woody Allen's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
6) Appreciate Cary Grant and Mel Brooks, in equal measure, all the more.
Written by an all-star cast of writers, directors, actors, screenwriters, playwrights, critics, and producers, this compendium is 778 pages long--almost as long as War and Peace (Tolstoy, by the way, says his two kopeks on the subject of film here), and it took me almost a month to finish, prompting Goodreads to remind me that my standing was at a precarious, unheard of "two books behind schedule." Regardless of its heft, this is a book best read slowly, languorously. The highlights, in no particular order:
1) H.L. Mencken's sketch on Rudolph Valentino, who impressed him as "eloquent" and "a flash of something else," which he concluded as, "for want of a better name, a gentleman."
2) Joan Didion's "John Wayne: A Love Song." Apparently, red Bordeaux was the Duke's drink of choice.
3) Klaus Kinski's excerpt from his memoir, Kinski Uncut, where he proceeds to eviscerate Werner Herzog. Crazy does diatribe vs another Crazy. Setting: the Amazon, no less. Priceless stuff!
4) Truman Capote's A Beautiful Child. A day with "salty" Marilyn Monroe, as they meander from Lexington to the South Street Pier via the Bowery, a tacky Chinese restaurant with champagne on the menu, tiny pawnshops, blood donor stations, and dollar bed hotels. It reads like a dreamy excerpt from a play, and is probably mostly fiction. Capote, you know.
5) "The Wahoo Boy" by Alva Johnston, who expounds on how "the university alumni are working for the high-school alumni and the high-school alumni are working for the grammar-school alumni." Using this yardstick, and based on Century Fox founder Darryl F. Zanuck's exemplary record, "anyone would naturally guess that he must have stopped school in the sixth grade. The fact is, however, that he went on and on and reached the eighth grade before he quit the academic halls of Wahoo, Nebraska."
6) "The Awful Fate of the Sex Goddess" by Parker Tyler is a dated, therefore candidly sexist take on his personal tastes (and distastes) on the subject of filmdom's sex goddesses. I could be wrong, but surely Tyler belongs to the minority when he opines that "another Italian star, Gina Lollobrigida, oddly resembles Miss (Elizabeth) Taylor although she is better looking." (Am I correct in taking that sentence to mean he thinks Gina Lollobrigida is better looking than Elizabeth Taylor?)
7) Pauline Kael's ode to "Last Tango in Paris," which is worth reading only for her running diatribe against Norman Mailer.
8) "Tango, Last Tango," or Norman Mailer's riposte to Pauline Kael's "Last Tango in Paris." Though it's still a movie review: "It is like a Western without the horses."
9) Duel in the Sun was one of the most embarrassing films I have ever seen. All the more since it starred Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones. And it appears we have David O. Selznick to thank for that. A louse of a man who hounded Jennifer Jones no end, driving first husband Robert Walker to his death. As this excerpt from Michael Powell's A Life in Movies concludes, Selznick "was a pain in the neck."
10) John Houseman's excerpt from Run-through, on the conceptualization, the molding of Citizen Charles Foster Kane, a job which fell squarely on Hearst and mistress's friend and frequent San Simeon guest, screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. If the article seemed familiar, it's because I had recently seen this episode of Mankiewicz's peripatetic, alcoholic existence set to film in Netflix's Mank. Good movie, too.
11) Preston Sturges on Preston Sturges, a hilarious essay on Sturges's desire and machinations to become "a prince of the blood." An ennobled director!
12) A fascinating excerpt from Anthony Quinn's autobiography One Man Tango, where he writes of a Rome, Fellini's Rome which no longer exists.
13) The excerpt from writer/top drawer insider Ben Hecht's autobiography A Child of the Century, is captivating for its candid, first account, fly-on-the-wall stories of some of Hollywood's most unforgettable films (Gone With the Wind) and actors (Jack Gilbert).
14) "Who Makes the Movies?" by Gore Vidal scores an unforgettable high for his suggested quick fix for William Wyler's Ben-Hur screenplay: "As boys they (Messala and Ben-Hur) were lovers. Now Messala wants to continue the affair. Ben-Hur rejects him. Messala is furious. Chagrin d'amour, the classic motivation for murder." Wyler is aghast, of course, but figures "anything is better than what we've got. So let's try it." But warns Vidal to "Don't ever tell Chuck what it's all about, or he'll fall apart."
15) Graham Greene's "Memories of a Film Critic." I think as a writer, Greene can do no wrong, but I suppose this perfection doesn't extend to film criticism. Consider this piece he wrote on Shirley Temple's movie Wee Willie Winkie, suggesting "she had a certain adroit coquetry which appealed to middle-aged men," for which he was promptly sued for libel before the Lord Chief Justice.
16) "I'm Not Bored" by Stanley Kauffman is about his sentiments on the subject of film watching as a professional critic, and its correlation to boredom. (The answer is a resounding no, of course.) Hysterical for its paragraph on movies featuring Germans: "John Voight has the leading role in a more seriously inane thriller, The Odessa File, and presents the young German journalist he is supposed to be, even to a beautifully precise accent. (Obeying that hilarious convention under which Germans in Germany, speaking English to one another in English-language films, have German accents."
17) The excerpt from stuntman/B-movie lister John Bonomo's "curious book," The Strongman tells of an incident involving a stunt gone wrong, so badly, terribly wrong, which he had the prescience of mind to reject.
18) F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story, "Crazy Sunday." It has some of the elements of Gatsby (booze, beautiful, complicated, unsatisfied wives, powerful, complaining husbands), but it's not quite Gatsby. Still a good read, though.
19) "The Movie People" by Robert Bloch. Another short story involving the movies. This one's written with a hint of Stephen King.
20) The excerpt from Oscar Levant's Memoirs of an Amnesiac is worth the read for its one-liners. And for these few phrases alone: "Years ago my wife and I and some guests were in Chasen's restaurant when a slovenly attired man came in and said hello to me. I cut him dead. Someone said, 'That was Howard Hughes.' Just to reveal my lack of character , I got up, went to his table, and shook hands with him."
21) The Groucho Letters from Groucho Marx to an amazingly dense Warner Brothers are an absolute riot.
22) And lastly, John Waters's spirited "Tour of L.A." is a scream. If anything, it has reaffirmed my resolve never to visit L.A. again.
Three and a half stars. Four stars if this had Umberto Eco's How to Play Indians, a maniacal treatise on how Indians are portrayed in movies.
Note: The appendix is a must-read for its international poll of the ten greatest films of all time, taken every ten years since 1952, the only year Citizen Kane didn't make it to number 1. (Released in 1941, perhaps it wasn't the legend it was yet to become, as it didn't make the top ten list at all. The lists for 1962, 1972, 1982, and 1992 placed Citizen Kane consistently at number 1.)
1) Read my copy of Larry McMurtry's The Last Picture Show.
2) Ditto my few books by Gore Vidal.
3) That goes for my chucked copy of Julia Phillips's You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again.
4) Read The Godfather again. Then watch the film, yet again.
5) Watch Woody Allen's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
6) Appreciate Cary Grant and Mel Brooks, in equal measure, all the more.
Written by an all-star cast of writers, directors, actors, screenwriters, playwrights, critics, and producers, this compendium is 778 pages long--almost as long as War and Peace (Tolstoy, by the way, says his two kopeks on the subject of film here), and it took me almost a month to finish, prompting Goodreads to remind me that my standing was at a precarious, unheard of "two books behind schedule." Regardless of its heft, this is a book best read slowly, languorously. The highlights, in no particular order:
1) H.L. Mencken's sketch on Rudolph Valentino, who impressed him as "eloquent" and "a flash of something else," which he concluded as, "for want of a better name, a gentleman."
2) Joan Didion's "John Wayne: A Love Song." Apparently, red Bordeaux was the Duke's drink of choice.
3) Klaus Kinski's excerpt from his memoir, Kinski Uncut, where he proceeds to eviscerate Werner Herzog. Crazy does diatribe vs another Crazy. Setting: the Amazon, no less. Priceless stuff!
4) Truman Capote's A Beautiful Child. A day with "salty" Marilyn Monroe, as they meander from Lexington to the South Street Pier via the Bowery, a tacky Chinese restaurant with champagne on the menu, tiny pawnshops, blood donor stations, and dollar bed hotels. It reads like a dreamy excerpt from a play, and is probably mostly fiction. Capote, you know.
5) "The Wahoo Boy" by Alva Johnston, who expounds on how "the university alumni are working for the high-school alumni and the high-school alumni are working for the grammar-school alumni." Using this yardstick, and based on Century Fox founder Darryl F. Zanuck's exemplary record, "anyone would naturally guess that he must have stopped school in the sixth grade. The fact is, however, that he went on and on and reached the eighth grade before he quit the academic halls of Wahoo, Nebraska."
6) "The Awful Fate of the Sex Goddess" by Parker Tyler is a dated, therefore candidly sexist take on his personal tastes (and distastes) on the subject of filmdom's sex goddesses. I could be wrong, but surely Tyler belongs to the minority when he opines that "another Italian star, Gina Lollobrigida, oddly resembles Miss (Elizabeth) Taylor although she is better looking." (Am I correct in taking that sentence to mean he thinks Gina Lollobrigida is better looking than Elizabeth Taylor?)
7) Pauline Kael's ode to "Last Tango in Paris," which is worth reading only for her running diatribe against Norman Mailer.
8) "Tango, Last Tango," or Norman Mailer's riposte to Pauline Kael's "Last Tango in Paris." Though it's still a movie review: "It is like a Western without the horses."
9) Duel in the Sun was one of the most embarrassing films I have ever seen. All the more since it starred Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones. And it appears we have David O. Selznick to thank for that. A louse of a man who hounded Jennifer Jones no end, driving first husband Robert Walker to his death. As this excerpt from Michael Powell's A Life in Movies concludes, Selznick "was a pain in the neck."
10) John Houseman's excerpt from Run-through, on the conceptualization, the molding of Citizen Charles Foster Kane, a job which fell squarely on Hearst and mistress's friend and frequent San Simeon guest, screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. If the article seemed familiar, it's because I had recently seen this episode of Mankiewicz's peripatetic, alcoholic existence set to film in Netflix's Mank. Good movie, too.
11) Preston Sturges on Preston Sturges, a hilarious essay on Sturges's desire and machinations to become "a prince of the blood." An ennobled director!
12) A fascinating excerpt from Anthony Quinn's autobiography One Man Tango, where he writes of a Rome, Fellini's Rome which no longer exists.
13) The excerpt from writer/top drawer insider Ben Hecht's autobiography A Child of the Century, is captivating for its candid, first account, fly-on-the-wall stories of some of Hollywood's most unforgettable films (Gone With the Wind) and actors (Jack Gilbert).
14) "Who Makes the Movies?" by Gore Vidal scores an unforgettable high for his suggested quick fix for William Wyler's Ben-Hur screenplay: "As boys they (Messala and Ben-Hur) were lovers. Now Messala wants to continue the affair. Ben-Hur rejects him. Messala is furious. Chagrin d'amour, the classic motivation for murder." Wyler is aghast, of course, but figures "anything is better than what we've got. So let's try it." But warns Vidal to "Don't ever tell Chuck what it's all about, or he'll fall apart."
15) Graham Greene's "Memories of a Film Critic." I think as a writer, Greene can do no wrong, but I suppose this perfection doesn't extend to film criticism. Consider this piece he wrote on Shirley Temple's movie Wee Willie Winkie, suggesting "she had a certain adroit coquetry which appealed to middle-aged men," for which he was promptly sued for libel before the Lord Chief Justice.
16) "I'm Not Bored" by Stanley Kauffman is about his sentiments on the subject of film watching as a professional critic, and its correlation to boredom. (The answer is a resounding no, of course.) Hysterical for its paragraph on movies featuring Germans: "John Voight has the leading role in a more seriously inane thriller, The Odessa File, and presents the young German journalist he is supposed to be, even to a beautifully precise accent. (Obeying that hilarious convention under which Germans in Germany, speaking English to one another in English-language films, have German accents."
17) The excerpt from stuntman/B-movie lister John Bonomo's "curious book," The Strongman tells of an incident involving a stunt gone wrong, so badly, terribly wrong, which he had the prescience of mind to reject.
18) F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story, "Crazy Sunday." It has some of the elements of Gatsby (booze, beautiful, complicated, unsatisfied wives, powerful, complaining husbands), but it's not quite Gatsby. Still a good read, though.
19) "The Movie People" by Robert Bloch. Another short story involving the movies. This one's written with a hint of Stephen King.
20) The excerpt from Oscar Levant's Memoirs of an Amnesiac is worth the read for its one-liners. And for these few phrases alone: "Years ago my wife and I and some guests were in Chasen's restaurant when a slovenly attired man came in and said hello to me. I cut him dead. Someone said, 'That was Howard Hughes.' Just to reveal my lack of character , I got up, went to his table, and shook hands with him."
21) The Groucho Letters from Groucho Marx to an amazingly dense Warner Brothers are an absolute riot.
22) And lastly, John Waters's spirited "Tour of L.A." is a scream. If anything, it has reaffirmed my resolve never to visit L.A. again.
Three and a half stars. Four stars if this had Umberto Eco's How to Play Indians, a maniacal treatise on how Indians are portrayed in movies.
Note: The appendix is a must-read for its international poll of the ten greatest films of all time, taken every ten years since 1952, the only year Citizen Kane didn't make it to number 1. (Released in 1941, perhaps it wasn't the legend it was yet to become, as it didn't make the top ten list at all. The lists for 1962, 1972, 1982, and 1992 placed Citizen Kane consistently at number 1.)
March 19, 2020
So, you know, I was really asking myself "Is it ok to just LOVE movies that much?". I mean, what is there so special? What's so meaningful, so great in this art, that just keeps me bonded to the screen? And then I read Ebert's "Book of Film". And wow, it's the kind of book that makes you love the movies. In my case, to love them even more. The compilation of essays is so cool. It's split into chapters discussing all the parts of the film industry, and every chapter just makes you love each part individually.
I had particularly great pleasure reading the chapter on the "Early Days" of cinema. It's a part of the history of film I don't have a lot of knowledge on, except the few Melies films I've seen. This paragraph of Maxim Gorky's "Lumiere" essay made the impression on me:
"Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. (...) Here I shall try to explain myself, lest I be suspected of madness or indulgence in symbolism. I was at Aumont's and saw Lumiere's cinematograph moving photography. The extraordinary impression it creates is so unique and complex that I doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances."
Of the other pieces of writing I enjoyed a lot deserves mentioning Truffaut's few words on "Citizen Kane":
"We loved this film absolutely because it was so complete-psychological, social, poetic, dramatic, comic, grotesque. Kane both demonstrates and mocks the will to power; it is a hymn to youth and a meditation on age, a study of the vanity of all human ambition and a poem about deterioration, and underneath it all a reflection on the solitude of exceptional beings, geniuses or monsters, monstrous geniuses."
Libby Gelman-Waxner's essay "Libby 'Noir'" was also delightful. Delightful.
"After Dark, My Sweet was my next film noir, although I suspect it might actually be some sort of NASA stress test; they could show it continually to astronauts to see how long humans can exist in space without entertainment. This movie was not just boring, it was like a two-week sleep-over visit from my aunt Frieda, my uncle Morty, who has to keep his right leg elevated so the blood clots
won't reach his brain, and their son, Heshy, who has started an international computer call-board for other 42 -year-olds who still live at home and are interested in cyborg comics and the Talmud."After Dark, My Sweet" is like the fulfillment of some ancient curse; it's as if God had said, By 1990, if people are still going to the movies and not getting enough fresh air, I will send down a
punishment."
There were essays there I've read before, such as Bazin's essay on westerns, encountered before in Cahiers du Cinema, or Woody Allen's autobiographical part, or Tarkovsky's monumental ideas on the cinematographic art. Still enjoyable.
I had particularly great pleasure reading the chapter on the "Early Days" of cinema. It's a part of the history of film I don't have a lot of knowledge on, except the few Melies films I've seen. This paragraph of Maxim Gorky's "Lumiere" essay made the impression on me:
"Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. (...) Here I shall try to explain myself, lest I be suspected of madness or indulgence in symbolism. I was at Aumont's and saw Lumiere's cinematograph moving photography. The extraordinary impression it creates is so unique and complex that I doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances."
Of the other pieces of writing I enjoyed a lot deserves mentioning Truffaut's few words on "Citizen Kane":
"We loved this film absolutely because it was so complete-psychological, social, poetic, dramatic, comic, grotesque. Kane both demonstrates and mocks the will to power; it is a hymn to youth and a meditation on age, a study of the vanity of all human ambition and a poem about deterioration, and underneath it all a reflection on the solitude of exceptional beings, geniuses or monsters, monstrous geniuses."
Libby Gelman-Waxner's essay "Libby 'Noir'" was also delightful. Delightful.
"After Dark, My Sweet was my next film noir, although I suspect it might actually be some sort of NASA stress test; they could show it continually to astronauts to see how long humans can exist in space without entertainment. This movie was not just boring, it was like a two-week sleep-over visit from my aunt Frieda, my uncle Morty, who has to keep his right leg elevated so the blood clots
won't reach his brain, and their son, Heshy, who has started an international computer call-board for other 42 -year-olds who still live at home and are interested in cyborg comics and the Talmud."After Dark, My Sweet" is like the fulfillment of some ancient curse; it's as if God had said, By 1990, if people are still going to the movies and not getting enough fresh air, I will send down a
punishment."
There were essays there I've read before, such as Bazin's essay on westerns, encountered before in Cahiers du Cinema, or Woody Allen's autobiographical part, or Tarkovsky's monumental ideas on the cinematographic art. Still enjoyable.
December 24, 2012
Worth buying just for the excerpt from Kinsky on Herzog. Maybe the Funniest thing I ever read
December 30, 2018
Slogged through this book for a year and it broadened my education in film.
Meticulous research and the normal bias of an expert make this an easy dip to research a film.
Meticulous research and the normal bias of an expert make this an easy dip to research a film.
May 24, 2021
Why did I read a nearly 800 page book about movies, over a three month period in which I watched zero movies?
I like to keep in touch with important culture even as I don't consume it. Ebert is as good as it gets in this space, and his curation and wide scope in this book are thrilling and comprehensive. I particularly enjoyed hearing from the directors: Mamet, Kurosawa, Waters.
I get anxious about how little reading I'm getting done compared to the past, but my internet reading is more comprehensive than ever-I think I subscribe to eight email newsletters that publish between daily and weekly, and I read 5-10 books a day to a baby; it is his favorite thing. I'm not reading less, just differently.
I like to keep in touch with important culture even as I don't consume it. Ebert is as good as it gets in this space, and his curation and wide scope in this book are thrilling and comprehensive. I particularly enjoyed hearing from the directors: Mamet, Kurosawa, Waters.
I get anxious about how little reading I'm getting done compared to the past, but my internet reading is more comprehensive than ever-I think I subscribe to eight email newsletters that publish between daily and weekly, and I read 5-10 books a day to a baby; it is his favorite thing. I'm not reading less, just differently.
September 18, 2022
A pretty amazing collection of writing about movies from the late 1800’s to when it was published (90’s). You get aspects of everything from the culture, technique, power, glamour, dark side, etc etc. it’s a broad and fascinating look with a lot to like. A few of the book excerpts will make you want to find the full books though so be prepared to add to your TBR list.
dnf
May 27, 2022I’ll come back 2 this I just do not have the brain cells rn!!!!!
October 16, 2013
This is a great book for the film lover because Ebert gathers so many classic or forgotten tidbits about the movies that it's a great beginning to in depth reading elsewhere. This hook led me to Ben Hecht's brilliant memoir and Lillian Ross's book on the making I'd Red a Badge of Courage.
October 25, 2025
It won’t replace Oxford’s Film Theory and Criticism, but Ebert’s editorial approach makes some useful contributions.
Ebert’s introductions to each selection give this anthology its character, which is almost always trenchant and inspired.
January 9, 2008
A collection of film criticism and commentary from Sarris, Capote, Kael, and Bukowski this book truly captures what great film is all about.
Read
April 14, 2010this is an amazing reference -- anyone into film would want this on their shelf. Writings from all kinds of people, from all eras of film.
January 16, 2013
Great collection of articles and excerpts from books about actors, directors and film history.
May 30, 2014
A but spotty in the selections, but there are many to choose from. The excerpt by Ben Hecht inspires me to read the whole thing. Plenty of humor and insight.
October 31, 2013
too many good stories to quibble about what sucked.
August 12, 2014
An anthology featuring the writings of great 20th Century novelists, critics, actors and directors.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews