Documentary about the life of Roger Ebert, based on his own autobiography of the same name. It was really quite fascinating to see the man behind the public movie critic. Ebert’s willingness to share with the public, up until almost the end of his life, his experiences with cancer is quite powerful. He was also a guy with a rather inflated ego and was full of himself. The examination of his relationship with Gene Siskel was both fascinating and kind of sad. But his successes cannot be denied – for example, his Pulitzer Prize as well as and his lifetime of bringing film critique out of academic discourse and into popular culture. Thumbs up for a film celebrating the life of a man who devoted his life to film and a man who taste in film most closely matched my own (except for Blue Velvet, a film about which I think he completely missed the point). 2014, 3.5 stars
