Other Books by Roger Ebert
An Illini Century: One Hundred Years of Campus Life
A Kiss Is Still a Kiss
Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook
Behind the Phantom’s Mask
Roger Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary
Roger Ebert’s Movie Home Companion (annually 1986–1993)
Roger Ebert’s Video Companion (annually 1994–1998)
Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook (annually 1999–2007, 2009–2012)
Questions for the Movie Answer Man
Roger Ebert’s Book of Film: From Tolstoy to Tarantino, the Finest Writing from a Century of Film
Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary
I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie
The Great Movies
The Great Movies II
Your Movie Sucks
Roger Ebert’s Four-Star Reviews 1967–2007
Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert
Scorsese by Ebert
Life Itself: A Memoir
A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length
With Daniel Curley
The Perfect London Walk
With Gene Siskel
The Future of the Movies: Interviews with Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas
DVD Commentary Tracks
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
Citizen Kane
Dark City
Casablanca
Crumb
Floating Weeds
Other Ebert’s Essentials
25 Great French Films
25 Movies to Mend a Broken Heart
27 Movies from the Dark Side
33 Movies to Restore Your Faith in Humanity copyright © 2012 by Roger Ebert. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.
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ISBN: 978-1-4494-2225-7
All the reviews in this book originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times.
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Contents
Introduction
Key to Symbols
Apollo 13
The Band's Visit
Bang the Drum Slowly
Breaking Away
Bridge on the River Kwai
Casablanca
Chariots of Fire
Cinema Paradiso
Departures
E.T.—The Extra-Terrestrial
Everlasting Moments
Gandhi
Grand Canyon
Hotel Rwanda
Ikiru
The King’s Speech
Lawrence of Arabia
Moolaadé
My Uncle Antoine
October Sky
Philadelphia
The Right Stuff
Say Amen, Somebody
Schindler’s List
The Shawshank Redemption
Silkwood
The Station Agent
The Straight Story
The Tree of Life
12 Angry Men
2001
Up
Whale Rider
Introduction
Sad movies rarely make me cry. I pick up all the cues, the story hits its mark, the music underlines the emotion, but most of the time my interest is only technical. For that matter, I don’t cry a whole lot at the movies anyway. But when I do, I notice that it’s almost always because of the goodness of a character. Someone in the film has been sympathetic, generous, or moved to help others because of a good heart.
Do such films “restore my faith in humanity”? At the time, yes, they nudge me in that direction. Then a picture with wall-to-wall brutality comes along to nudge me back again. I suspect I would be a happier person if I only went to see movies I recommend.
The selections in this e-book will, in general, warm your heart and make you happy to have seen them. Consider the animated masterpiece Up, which is about an old grouch. (Trolls on the Internet said he looked like me, but never mind.) Up opens in an unexpected and beautiful way. Carl and Ellie grow up, have a courtship, marry, buy a ramshackle house and turn it into their dream home, are happy together and grow old. This process is silent, except for music. It’s shown in a lovely sequence that deals with the life experience in a way that is almost never found in family animation. The lovebirds save their loose change in a gallon jug intended to finance their trip to the legendary Paradise Falls, but real life gets in the way: flat tires, home repairs, medical bills.
The focus of the film is on Carl’s life after Ellie. But so many people told me this prelude was one of the most touching “films,” in itself, they’d seen. Carl’s later heroism in the jungles of South America are terrific entertainment, but this opening, of two ordinary people who care for one another, is the part that gets you.
A film like The Band’s Visit could hardly be more different. A military band from Egypt, on an official visit to Israel, finds itself dropped by a bus at an isolated small crossroads that has nothing to do with their mission. In a long evening and a longer night, the local cafe owner and the bandleader, who are technically enemies in a political sense, begin to talk, and share, and sense their common humanity. It all happens in such a low yet realistic way, you hardly realize it’s happening at all.
Departures, from Japan, won an Academy Award for the year’s best foreign film. It was possibly the most cheered film we’ve ever shown at my Ebertfest film festival at the University of Illinois. I imagine many or most of the readers of this collection will not have seen it. It is about so many things, simultaneously, that it’s impossible to summarize. Maybe beneath everything else it deals with learning to see people as they really are, and accepting them on those terms. This process, we learn, can continue even after death.
The happiest film on the list must be Say Amen, Somebody. It’s an example of a film that many people assume they wouldn’t be interested in. A documentary about the pioneers of African American gospel music? Sounds like a boring educational film, right? Yet what joy and priceless human nature are on display here, as we meet Mother Willie May Ford Smith and Thomas A. Dorsey. George Nierenberg, the director, is not a particularly religious person, but he respects his subjects, introduces their loved ones, and captures them at important moments in their lives. There is also a great deal of music, and we sense the goodness and charisma in his two stars.
There’s a reason for every title in this collection. They all have that one thing in common—the goodness of people. They are very different people and good in many different ways, but all of them, whatever the place in life that fate has led them to, try to do the best they can with their opportunities. Yes, that can restore your faith in humanity. We need more of these films and fewer weekend blockbusters entertaining young people with the slaughter and suffering of anonymous victims in action pictures.
ROGER EBERT
Key to Symbols
A great film
G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17
: Ratings of the Motion Picture Association of America
G
Indicates that the movie is suitable for general audiences