Roger Ebert Film Quotations

Every great film should seem new every time you see it.

Many really good films allow us to empathize with other lives.

Many thrillers follow such reliable formulas that you can look at what's happening and guess how much longer a film has to run.

'Grand Illusion' and 'Rules of the Game' are routinely included on lists of the greatest films, and deserve to be.

One sign of a great actor is when he can be alone by himself on the screen, doing almost nothing, and producing one of a film's defining moments.

The buried code of many American films has become: If I kill you, I have won and you have lost. The instinctive ethical code of traditional Hollywood, the code by which characters like James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda lived, has been lost.

A film is a terrible thing to waste.

Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film.

It's rare to find a film that goes for broke and says, 'To hell with the consequences.'

James Cameron's films have always been distinguished by ground-breaking technical excellence.

Film theory has nothing to do with film.

A remarkable documentary that's also one of the most beautiful nature films I've seen.

The film argues to the young that the old were young once, too, and contain within them all that the young know, and more.

Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in The Fugitive. I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies.

Dirty Love wasn't written and directed, it was committed. Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn't rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent I am not certain that anyone involved has ever seen a movie, or knows what one is.

Films like Fargo are why I love the movies.

It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.