Quotes from Roger Ebert

calling out, "Trog! Trog!" As if Trog knew the

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.

He is so solemn, detached, and uninvolved he makes Mr. Spock look like Hunter S. Thompson at closing time.

The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?

To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts.

The dancers march about and twirl their scarves as if Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the Will had been gotten pregnant by Busby Berkeley.

Too-Soon Apology. Whenever one character seems to have died, and his best friend arrives just

Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said, "To kill one lover may be regarded as a misfortune. To kill three seems like carelessness?

Buñuel's films constitute one of the most distinctive bodies of work in the first century of films. He was cynical, but not depressed. We say one thing and do another, yes, but that doesn't make us evil—only human and, from his point of view, funny He has been called a cruel filmmaker, but the more I look at his films the more wisdom and acceptance I find. He sees that we are hypocrites, admits to being one himself, and believes we were probably made that way.

Robin Hood is a high-tech and well-made violent action picture using the name of Robin Hood for no better reason than that it's an established brand not protected by copyright

We'd had a revelation. This was the direction American movies should take: into idiosyncratic characters, into dialogue with an ear for the vulgar and the literate, into a plot free to surprise us about the characters, into an existential ending not required to be happy.

There is a children's film made for the world we should live in, rather than the one we occupy. A film with no villains. No fight scenes. No evil adults. No fighting between the two kids. No scary monsters. No darkness before the dawn. A world that is benign. A world where if you meet a strange, towering creature in the forest, you curl up on its tummy and have a nap.

Saturday Night Fever was Gene Siskel's favorite movie, and he watched it at least seventeen times. We all have movies like that, titles that transcend ordinary categories of good and bad and penetrate straight to our hearts.

I am also fascinated by how Darwin's theory of evolution applies to zombies.

Crowds can be frightening. They have a way of impressing low, base taste upon their members. Watching the way thousands of people in his audience could not think for themselves, could not find the courage to allow their ordinary feelings of decency and taste to prevail, I understood better how demagogues are possible.

All happy endings are the same, but every unhappy ending is unhappy in its own way.

going to see a man about a dog.

As Oscar Wilde once said, "To lose one cell phone may be regarded as a misfortune; to go through seventy looks like carelessness.

Finding success in a Michael bay film is like finding the Virgin on a slice of toast, but less rewarding.

The dialogue seems to have been ripped throbbing with passion from the pages of Investor's Business Daily.

The plot is so familiar the end credits should have issued a blanket thank-you to a century of Hollywood lovecoms. Through a tortuous series of contrived misunderstandings, the boy and girl avoid happiness for most of the movie, although not as successfully as we do.

I was reminded of the child prodigy who was summoned to perform for a famous pianist. The child climbed into the piano stool and played something by Chopin with great speed and accuracy. When the child had finished, the great musician patted it on the head and said, "You can play the notes. Someday, you may be able to play the music." Puppet

We got two gold-record singers and they don't sing? So? We got five Oscar-winning actors and they don't need to act much.

If there's one thing I've learned in this life, it's that you never say no to an old gypsy woman with a blind eye and leprous fingernails.