The Great Movies
Roger Ebert
Language: English
Pages: 544
ISBN: 0767910389
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
America’s most trusted and best-known film critic Roger Ebert presents one hundred brilliant essays on some of the best movies ever made.
For the past five years Roger Ebert, the famed film writer and critic, has been writing biweekly essays for a feature called "The Great Movies," in which he offers a fresh and fervent appreciation of a great film. The Great Movies collects one hundred of these essays, each one of them a gem of critical appreciation and an amalgam of love, analysis, and history that will send readers back to that film with a fresh set of eyes and renewed enthusiasm–or perhaps to an avid first-time viewing. Ebert’s selections range widely across genres, periods, and nationalities, and from the highest achievements in film art to justly beloved and wildly successful popular entertainments. Roger Ebert manages in these essays to combine a truly populist appreciation for our most important form of popular art with a scholar’s erudition and depth of knowledge and a sure aesthetic sense. Wonderfully enhanced by stills selected by Mary Corliss, film curator at the Museum of Modern Art, The Great Movies is a treasure trove for film lovers of all persuasions, an unrivaled guide for viewers, and a book to return to again and again.
The Great Movies includes: All About Eve • Bonnie and Clyde • Casablanca • Citizen Kane • The Godfather • Jaws • La Dolce Vita • Metropolis • On the Waterfront • Psycho • The Seventh Seal • Sweet Smell of Success • Taxi Driver • The Third Man • The Wizard of Oz • and eighty-five more films.
From the Hardcover edition.
Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film
of the onboard preparation. At the last moment, the men of the Potemkin 51 signal their comrades on the fleet to join them—and the ship steams through the fleet without a shot being fired at it. Battleship Potemkin is conceived as class-conscious revolutionary propaganda, and Sergei Eisenstein deliberately avoids creating any threedimensional individuals (even Vakulinchuk is seen largely as a symbol). Instead, masses of men move in unison, as in the many shots looking down at the Potemkin’s
not unknown in Miami in 1981, the characters here are constantly in heat; there is a scene where Ned comes home, takes off his shirt, and stands in front of the open refrigerator. The film opens with an inn burning in the distance (“Somebody’s torched it to clear the lot,” Ned says. “Probably one of my 81 B o d y H e at clients”). There are other fires. There is the use of the color red. There is the sense that heat inflames passion and encourages madness. In this heat, Matty seems cool.
Whale stopped making films in 1941 and lived quietly and luxuriously, painting and socializing. In the film, he is seen at the end of his life, portrayed by Ian McKellen as a civilized, still hopeful gay man who in his new gardener (Brendan Fraser) sees a last opportunity for seduction. Giving Fraser a flattop haircut, however, is perhaps insisting too much on the parallel between directors as Gods, and the Monsters they create. [ L Broken Blossoms ] illian Gish told D. W. Griffith she was
and in a long career that ended with The Whales of August (1987), she played many strong women. Here she is essentially the passive object of male fantasy—of Battling, who sees her as servant and victim, and Cheng, who idealizes her as his “White Blossom.” Griffith emphasizes both her angelic face and her weakness by often lighting and photographing her from above, and many years later, on the set of Robert Altman’s A Wedding (1978), I heard her rebuke a photographer who was trying for a
movies, the key elements in the frame are in focus, and those closer or farther away may not be. When everything is in focus, the filmmakers must give a lot more thought to how they direct the viewer’s attention, first here and then there. What the French call mise-enscène—the arrangement within the frame—becomes more important. ■ OP T ICAL ILLUSIONS. Deep focus is especially tricky because movies are two-dimensional, and so you need visual guideposts to determine the true scale of a scene.