Here's something you don't hear said about many movie critics: people love Roger Ebert. ... There's a good reason for this: Ebert doesn't stand between moviegoers and the audience. Rather, his regular readers are serious movie-lovers who see him as their rep, the guy out there fighting to make movies less stupid, more entertaining, more intelligent, more everything. You don't have to agree with him - and I certainly didn't in this book, when he ragged on Team America and Jesus is Magic, two movies where I laughed myself sick - to know that he's on your side. He sees the bad movies so you don't have to, and he's seen the same ones over and over. ... Mere bile, though, isn't his game; he's as interested in why movies fail as why they work. A lot of the time, it's obvious: because it's made by morons for morons. In these cases, Ebert drags us through the plot in as entertaining a fashion as possible. ... Forty years on, he's still a moviegoer's best friend.

Criticism·Media·Audience·Community·Trust