Author: Roger Ebert Page 2

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

The movie has been signed by Michael Bay. This is the same man who directed The Rock in 1996. Now he has made Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Faust made a better deal.

(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

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.

(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

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

The movie is being revived around the country for midnight cult showings. Midnight is not late enough.

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

Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica… it was the festival's closing film, coming at the end like the horses in a parade, perhaps for the same reason.

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

Last year, I reviewed a nine-hour documentary about the lives of Mongolian yak herdsmen, and I would rather see it again than sit through The Frighteners.

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

Wild Wild West is a comedy dead zone. You stare in disbelief as scenes flop and die. The movie is all concept and no content; the elaborate special effects are like watching money burn on the screen…

(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

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

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

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

I urgently advise hospitals: Do not make the DVD available to your patients; there may be an outbreak of bedpans thrown at TV screens.

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

Add it all up, and what you’ve got here is a waste of good electricity. I’m not talking about the electricity between the actors. I’m talking about the current to the projector.

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

Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours…

(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

You used to be able to depend on a bad film being poorly made. No longer. The Punisher: War Zone [sic] is one of the best-made bad movies I’ve seen… Its only flaw is that it’s disgusting.

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

You know you’re in trouble with a sequel when the word of mouth advises you to see the first movie twice instead.

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

Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time.

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