Author: Roger Ebert Page 2

If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense, and the human desire to be entertained. No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

Valentine's Day is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think it's more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do not date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

Only enormously talented people could have made Death to Smoochy. Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

This is an old idea, beautifully expressed by Wordsworth, who said, ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy.’ If I could quote the whole poem instead of completing this review, believe me, we’d all be happier. But I press on.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

Spice World is obviously intended as a ripoff of A Hard Day's Night which gave The Beatles to the movies… the huge difference, of course, is that the Beatles were talented — while, let's face it, the Spice Girls could be duplicated by any five women under the age of 30 standing in line at Dunkin' Donuts.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

Parents: If you encounter teenagers who say they liked this movie, do not let them date your children.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

Young men: If you attend this crap with friends who admire it, tactfully inform them they are idiots. Young women: If your date likes this movie, tell him you’ve been thinking it over, and you think you should consider spending some time apart.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

Boat Trip arrives preceded by publicity saying many homosexuals have been outraged by the film. Now that it's in theaters, everybody else has a chance to join them. Not that the film is outrageous. That would be asking too much. It is dim-witted, unfunny, too shallow to be offensive…

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

It's the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

This movie is not merely bad, but incompetent. I get tapes in the mail from 10th graders that are better made than this… I have often asked myself, “What would it look like if the characters in a movie were animatronic puppets created by aliens with an imperfect mastery of human behavior?” Now I know.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

To call A Lot Like Love dead in the water is an insult to water.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson star. … If I were taken off the movie beat and assigned to cover the interior design of bowling alleys, I would have some idea of how they must have felt as they made this film.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

If you plan to miss this movie, better miss it quickly; I doubt if it’ll be around to miss for long.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

Since the scenes where they're together are so much less convincing than the ones where they fall apart, watching the movie is like being on a double-date from hell.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

If I ever do a festival of films that deserve to be overlooked, Friends & Lovers is my opening night selection.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

Saving Silverman is so bad in so many different ways that perhaps you should see it, as an example of the lowest slopes of the bell-shaped curve.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism

The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.

(1942 – 2013) American film critic, journalist & screenwriter
Reviews/Criticism