Roger Ebert's Great Films

Roger Ebert's very personal list of the films he finds most worthy of our attention. Who am I to argue?

Duck Soup (1933)

Friday, July 1st, 2011
★★★★★

Remember, you’re fighting for this woman’s honour, which is probably more than she ever did.

I would offer up Duck Soup as the spiritual great-grandfather of movies like Blazing Saddles and Airplane!. Its plot seems to exist as an afterthought, unnecessary baggage that gets in the way of the movie’s true purpose: “four Jews trying to get a laugh,” as Groucho Marx would later confess.

Duck Soup

It’s possible to view Duck Soup as a brilliant political farce, lacerating the bloated self-importance of world leaders, or you can just look to it for 68 minutes of pure post-Vaudevillian anarchy. It works both ways. This may not be the Marx Brothers at their most coherent, but it’s easily them at their funniest.

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Director:  | Released:  | 68 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

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Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Thursday, May 5th, 2011
★★★★★

Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!

Stanley Kubrick’s acid-soaked absurdist farce about the end of the world has to stand alone among the genre of cold war films in the same way that 2001: A Space Odyssey stands alone among science-fiction films. (more…)

Director:  | Released:  | 95 min. | Rated:  | Genres: , , 

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A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011
★★★★★

Mommy… I’m sorry I broke myself.

In some ways this movie is the cinematic equivalent of artificial insemination using a dead man’s swimmers. A.I. had been on Stanley Kubrick’s back, front, and middle burners at various times since the early seventies. For a while, it looked like it wouldn’t see the light of day until development hell froze over and, when Kubrick kicked it after completing Eyes Wide Shut, it seemed inevitable that A.I. would forever remain as Kubrick’s great “lost” project.

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Director:  | Released:  | 146 min. | Rated:  | Genres: , 

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The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

Monday, May 2nd, 2011
★★★★★

Do not speak to me of rules. This is war! This is not a game of cricket!

Even before its classic final scene, the subject of madness runs under this particular bridge, as all three of the main characters have their sanity questioned at some point and the chief questioner, played by William Holden, jokingly questions his own mental state. For all its vast scale, The Bridge on the River Kwai remains an indelible and intimate portrait of fanaticism fatally clashing with fanaticism.

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Director:  | Released:  | 161 min. | Rated:  | Genres: , , , 

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The Searchers (1956)

Friday, January 16th, 2009
★★★★★

You speak good American for a Comanch. Somebody teach ya?

John Ford’s The Searchers is a movie in desperate search for an identity. For every aspect that is excellent, two more make you want to cringe. The film seems to have feet in two eras. Its ambivalent attitude toward the stereotypical treatment of Native Americans seems slightly ahead of its time, although Hollywood would do much better later. Balancing against this are characters and storylines that would have seemed dated when Ford and John Wayne were first working together back in the thirties.

The Duke

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Director:  | Released:  | 119 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

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Paths of Glory (1957)

Sunday, November 4th, 2007
★★★★★

There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die.

Paths of Glory

Legendary French director François Truffaut famously said that it was impossible to make a truly anti-war film, because film inherently glamorizes everything it depicts. That quote is hard to reconcile, however, with the evidence of Stanley Kubrick’s first truly great movie. (more…)

Director:  | Released:  | 88 min. | Rated:  | Genres: , , 

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Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

AKA: El laberinto del fauno
Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
★★★★★

Why would an old faun lie to you?

Guillermo del Toro’s dark tale of Franco’s Spain is either a fantastical allegory for the struggle against oppression or a lyrical testimony to the power of a child’s imagination as an antidote to the horrors of the adult world. The strength of the film is that it works both ways.

Pan's Labyrinth

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Director:  | Released:  | 119 min. | Rated:  | Genres: , , , , 

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Jaws (1975)

Monday, July 30th, 2007
★★★★★

I’m not going to waste my time arguing with a man who’s lining up to be a hot lunch.

Many of you might not be old enough to recall but Jaws effectively invented the concept of the summer movie as we know it today. Two years before Star Wars, it was the first film to really demonstrate the power of all those teenagers, recently freed from school, to generate an ass-load of money at the box office.

Jaws

Of course, this was also before the modern marketing machine was fully geared up, so in order for a movie to become a mega-blockbuster, it depended on a lot of word-of-mouth to get people’s butts into the seats. In those days, it still required that the film not suck. Mission accomplished, I’d say.

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Director:  | Released:  | 124 min. | Rated:  | Genres: , , 

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Babel (2006)

Friday, June 29th, 2007
★★★★★

This is your fucked-up country, it’s your responsibility!

Babel, the third and probably final collaboration between director Alejandro González Iñárritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga, is a well-acted, beautifully shot film that somehow manages to hold you at arm’s length for more than two hours. It is frustrating because you do want to know these characters better but the movie never lets you get close enough.

Babel

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Director:  | Released:  | 143 min. | Rated:  | Genres: , 

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The Big Red One (1980)

Tuesday, June 5th, 2007
★★★★★

By now we’d come to look at all replacements as dead men who temporarily had the use of the arms and legs.

The Big Red One, Samuel Fuller’s fictionalized retelling of his own experiences as a member of the 1st Infantry Division in World War II, is a particularly effective grunts-eye view of the war, despite its somewhat meager budget. It follows an unnamed Sergeant (Lee Marvin) and four soldiers of his “first squad” who manage to survive the war with him. They join him as inexperienced “wet-noses” before the invasion of North Africa and follow him to the very end of the war, when they liberate a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

Big Red One

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Director:  | Released:  | 113 min. | Rated:  | Genres: , 

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This is Spinal Tap (1984)

Saturday, March 3rd, 2007
★★★★★

Well, I’m sure I’d feel much worse if I weren’t under such heavy sedation.

After doing for heavy metal what Blazing Saddles did for westerns, This Is Spinal Tap also managed to spark a minor cottage industry known as the Christopher Guest mockumentary. Now, Tap was hardly the first fake rock documentary, since The Rutles had been around for several years. Eric Idle’s spoof of Beatlemania, however, never got near the National Film Registry as did Rob Reiner’s affectionate yet lacerating take on head-bangers.

This Is Spinal Tap

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Director:  | Released:  | 82 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

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The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007
★★★★★

I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.

Plato believed that everything in the world has an “ideal universal form” that represents the perfect example of the imperfect things in the real world. For many, The Maltese Falcon is the Platonic ideal of the hard-boiled detective story. True, it’s not the earliest example of the genre, the original novel already having been adapted twice for the screen in the previous decade, but it still contains classic examples of what we consider the basic elements of that genre of film. Most of would now be tired clichés of detective films were either established or popularized by this classic version of Dashiell Hammet’s novel.

The Maltese Falcon

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Director:  | Released:  | 100 min. | Rated:  | Genres: , 

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