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‘Air’ Review: Director Ben Affleck Shoots and Scores with His Biographical Sports Drama

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 SXSW Film Festival. Amazon Studios releases the film in theaters on Wednesday, April 5.

Today, there are 37 different variations of Air Jordan models available. From the basketball court to the streets and even the catwalk, the Nike sneakers have become a staple of American culture. Director Ben Affleck ’s “Air” invites audiences into Nike headquarters to experience the story behind the popular shoe that was built solely for the legendary athlete for which it is named: Michael Jordan.

Set in 1984, Affleck stars as Nike founder Phil Knight. An ambitious, rebellious, and passionate leader who likes to live by — and reiterate — Douglas McArthur’s famous quote “you are remembered for the rules you break,” Knight thrived on taking risks. During this time, Nike was not as successful as its competitors Adidas and Converse, and their NBA division was struggling to sign an athlete to sponsor their gear. Nike’s basketball guru in charge of changing that slump was Sonny Vaccaro (played in the film by Matt Damon ). As the Nike board began questioning the relevance of his position at Nike, Vaccaro sought to do something wild: sign Chicago Bulls’ rookie Michael Jordan to literally change the game for Nike and marketing a brand at large.

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Affleck’s directing style is on point, with several aerial and close-up shots that allow the actors to really shine. He also includes old footage from famous commercials, music videos, and sports games to set the stage for the era audiences are about to revisit or enter for the first time. Interludes of quotes from Nike’s 10 principles also help viewers to understand the ethos of the dedicated company employees, many of which are fans and former athletes or runners themselves. For example, “our business is change,” “we’re on offense, all the time,” and “if we do the right things we’ll make money damn near automatic,” are shown throughout the film. Several references to the company’s history are mentioned throughout the film’s 1 hour and 52 minute running time and potentially could have been pulled from Knight’s inspirational memoir “Shoe Dog.”

In order to sign Jordan, Vaccaro has to go through Michael’s arrogant agent David Falk (hilariously played by Chris Messina). The competitive banter between Vaccaro and Falk comprise some of the best comedic scenes in the film and will have audiences rolling thanks to writer Alex Convery’s smart script. While Falk is primarily concerned with financial gain, Vaccaro’s approach to their corporate competition is to go around Jordan’s agent and approach his parents face-to-face, a bold approach viewed as unprofessional by his colleagues. Driving to North Carolina, Vaccaro meets James R. Jordan Sr. (Julius Tennon) and Deloris Jordan (Viola Davis) in an attempt to win them over.  

As the Nike crew prepares for the big pitch to the Jordan family, audiences are introduced to the other key players. Jason Bateman stars as Rob Strasser, VP of Marketing, and Chris Tucker as Howard White, the man who eventually became VP of the Jordan Brand for Nike. Bateman brings a cautionary yet supportive approach to Strasser, while Tucker’s vibrant and electric energy breaks through and captivates the Jordans as White. Each actor’s performance in “Air” is a phenomenal in their own right and they work like a team to create one of the most engaging buisness success stories in history on screen.  

Cinematographer Robert Richardson captures initial scenes with a grainy haze synonymous with old school VHS tapes one would use to record games back in the ‘80s. As the image clears throughout the film, Richardson is able to counterbalance the vintage set design courtesy of production designer François Audouy extremely well. Shoe dogs and sneaker heads will enjoy several Easter eggs in the Nike office including newspaper clippings from Nike’s original Blue Ribbon days and several artifacts from Knight’s international travels.

Costume designer Charlese Antoinette Jones does an amazing job conveying the times and showcasing all of the vintage Nike clothing worn by the staff. This creative team behind the camera excels at immersing audiences into the business world of the ‘80s while also playing on the modern day love of nostalgia.  

The decision to not have an actor play Michael Jordan was wise. Affleck clearly took a great amount of care with this project by respecting the legend and his loving family. He consulted with Jordan to get his blessing on the film, receive any input, and honor Jordan’s condition to have the supreme Viola Davis play his mother. While many may assume “Air” is about the game or MJ himself, it is actually about the underdogs of Nike creating a brand that was revolutionary for the times. Before Air Jordans, there had not been a marketing strategy to this degree. As Strasser says, “a shoe is just a shoe until someone steps into it.”  

Another impactful aspect of the film is how the story becomes about family. Davis brings such a large amount of warmth and strength to playing Deloris Jordan, a woman who knew her son’s worth and fought for him to get his share of the pie. Subtle yet stern, her performance evokes such empathy and class as Deloris navigates the business deals proposed to her and her adoring husband. On several occasions, her presence on screen has the tendency to give audiences goosebumps because of just how perfectly she honors Mrs. Jordan and how she carries herself knowing that her son is a legend whose impact to the game will be forever lifechanging. It’s all quite beautiful.  

Each actor in Affleck’s latest film gives a powerful and awards-worthy performance. “Air” is a slam dunk and ultimately one of the best sports movies ever made. Affleck successfully captures Nike’s heartwarming and hilarious marketing   journey while paying respectful homage to all involved. “Air” is a tremendous underdog story filled with lovable characters. It’s truly a film about legends made by legends.  

“Air” premiered at the 2023 SXSW Film Festival. Amazon Studios will release it in theaters on Wednesday, April 5.

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‘Air’ Review: The Game Changers

In Ben Affleck’s enjoyable movie, Matt Damon stars as the Nike exec who’s trying to sign a young Michael Jordan. But first he must contend with Viola Davis.

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By Manohla Dargis

It’s ridiculous how entertaining “Air” is given that it’s about shoes, even if it works overtime to persuade you that it’s also about other, nobler truths, too. Mind you, the pair that Nike presented to Michael Jordan in a 1984 meeting were custom. The company wanted badly to sign Jordan to an endorsement deal, so it created black-and-red high tops with a white midsole and a multimillion-dollar sweetener. Jordan may have preferred Adidas, but he soon laced up for Nike, changing footwear, sports stardom and athletic marketing forever.

Directed by Ben Affleck, the frothily amusing and very eager-to-please “Air” tells the oft-told tale of how Nike signed Jordan to a contract that made each astonishingly rich. Yet while the man and the money are inevitably central to this deeply American story, both remain strategically obscured. Jordan (Damian Young) is shown only in teasing partial view, his face concealed (you see the real Jordan in archival images), an initially distracting decision that grows less gimmicky and seems more natural as the story shifts focus toward virtuous, less fungible human values like love, genius, grit, perseverance, righteousness and faith.

The movie’s principal true believer is Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon). (Like most of the main characters, Vaccaro is based on, and named after, a real person , though the actual Sonny is far juicier than he is here.) A vision in beige with a beeper attached to his belt, his belly spilling over that same belt, Sonny is a familiar, cartoonish sad-sack, a figure right out of Mike Judge’s “Office Space.” He’s divorced and still unattached, and his workaholic habits don’t bode well for romance. He routinely buys his nightly dinner at the local convenience store, making small talk with the clerk, then eats alone while staring at the TV or, in his case, side-by-side sets.

The story heats up when Sonny and his colleagues at Nike start looking at the latest N.B.A. draftees to sign. Nike doesn’t want to spend much, so most of its execs are scouring the lower picks. But Sonny has a gift for spotting talent, and he’s aiming high: Jordan, the 21-year-old who’s left college early and whose moves he studies on smeary tape. Not everyone can read the future or see talent like Sonny, and much of the movie involves his wooing of two notably different dealmakers and breakers: Phil Knight (an amusing Affleck), Nike’s preening co-founder and chief executive, and Jordan’s mother, Deloris (a sensational Viola Davis).

Written by Alex Convery, “Air” nicely hits the sweet spot between light comedy and lighter drama that’s tough to get right. It’s funny, but its generous laughs tend to be low-key and are more often dependent on their delivery than on the actual writing. Damon is crucial to selling the humor. He’s packed on weight for the role, and he gives the character a stolid, tamped-down physicality, but he also lets you see the eddies of anger and frustration raging under the character’s skin. Sonny is put-upon and dejected, but he’s quick witted and doesn’t suffer fools (or Knight), and his patience has already been worn perilously thin when the story opens.

Waiting for Sonny to explode helps build the comic tension; watching him try to sign Jordan creates the relatively less punchy drama. Some of the juiciest laughs come from Sonny’s interactions with the gnomic Knight, a showboating supporting role that Affleck embraces with a sly, vacant deadpan and tragically unhip styling. Affleck knows how to steal scenes, and he pilfers a few, but he’s a very good and generous director of actors. He’s loaded up “Air” with terrific supporting players, including Jason Bateman and Chris Tucker, who, as Nike suits, add distinct flavor and some brilliant contrapuntal timing to the mix.

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• Entertainment

7 of Roger Ebert’s Most Brutal Movie Reviews

T he long Fourth of July weekend is another kind of holiday for film lovers: The documentary about beloved film critic Roger Ebert, Life Itself , hits theaters and on-demand services Friday. Directed by Steve James ( Hoop Dreams ), the film began as a loose adaptation of Ebert’s 2011 memoir of the same name, but as Ebert’s health declined — he was diagnosed with cancer in 2002 — the documentary became a frank, revealing and sometimes hard-to-watch look at his final days before his death in 2013. “I think it’s so poetic that a man like Roger, who spent his whole life reviewing movies, ends up ending his life on the big screen,” Ebert’s wife, Chaz Ebert, told Flavorwire in a recent interview.

Some of those movies he reviewed over the years were great — others, not so much. Reading Ebert’s passionate praise of exemplary filmmaking was a treat for readers, but his take-downs of the very worst of box offices provided another kind of joy. Here are seven of his most entertaining negative reviews.

Valentine’s Day Giving it two stars, Ebert didn’t totally trash this star-studded rom-com from 2010, but he also concluded his review with some sage dating advice: “ 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.”

North Ebert disliked North so much, one of the collections of his most negative reviews, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie , gets its name from his 1994 take: “I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.”

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Nobody really watches Michael Bay films expecting critically acclaimed works of art, but Ebert’s review of the 2009 blockbuster is just as fun, if not more: “[The movie] is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys.”

Caligula Ebert admitted he couldn’t even make it all the way through the film in his 1980 review: “ Caligula is sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash. If it is not the worst film I have ever seen, that makes it all the more shameful: People with talent allowed themselves to participate in this travesty. Disgusted and unspeakably depressed, I walked out of the film after two hours of its 170-minute length … Caligula is not good art, it is not good cinema, and it is not good porn.”

Police Academy This 1984 attempt at poking fun at cop movies failed miserably: “It’s so bad, maybe you should pool your money and draw straws and send one of the guys off to rent it so that in the future, whenever you think you’re sitting through a bad comedy, he could shake his head, and chuckle tolerantly, and explain that you don’t know what bad is.”

Deuce Bigalo: European Gigalo This 2005 piece also inspired the title of Ebert’s second collection of reviews about the worst movies: “[ Deuce star Rob] Schneider retaliated by attacking [ex-Los Angeles Times columnist Patrick] Goldstein in full-page ads … ‘Maybe you didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven’t invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who’s Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers.’ … As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.”

Mad Dog Time The first line of this 1996 review doesn’t hold back: “ 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. Oh, I’ve seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you’re not sure they have a bus line.”

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Roger Ebert

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http://rogerebert.com/

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Watch CBS News

Roger Ebert's 10 greatest films of all time

By David Morgan

April 8, 2013 / 1:54 PM EDT / CBS News

Updated April 8 1:53 p.m. ET

(CBS News) There were few more passionate advocates for films as art than Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert, who died Thursday at the age of 70 after a long battle against cancer.

Despite the seeming limitations of serving as the co-host of a syndicated TV review show and plying his trade in the Midwest (where distribution of independent or foreign-language films can be spotty at best), Ebert helped shine a light on deserving films to millions. He was an early supporter of such noted directors as Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee and Werner Herzog, and his published collections of film criticism offered a bracing celebration of cinematic innovation and emotional clarity (and, in the case of "I Hated, Hated, HATED This Movie," a piercing cry against mediocrity).

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In 2012 the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound magazine polled international critics to choose their 10 favorite films, as it has every decade since 1952. Ebert once again offered his selection , despite his qualms about reducing his passion for the medium into a tidy Top-10 list. ("Lists are ridiculous, but if you're going to vote, you have to play the game," he relented.) Films which he'd previously included in his S&S polls, such as "Notorious" and the documentary "Gates of Heaven," he considered thusly canonized, and was willing to cut loose, to welcome new entries into the pantheon.

• "Vertigo" tops "Kane" in critics' poll of greatest films

The following, in alphabetical order, are Ebert's 2012 choices. Click through this gallery by the tabs up top to read excerpts from his published reviews.

"Aguirre, Wrath of God" (1972), directed by Werner Herzog

"Werner Herzog's 'Aguirre, the Wrath of God' is one of the great haunting visions of the cinema. It tells the story of the doomed expedition of the conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro, who in 1560 and 1561 led a body of men into the Peruvian rain forest, lured by stories of the lost city. . . .

"The film is not driven by dialogue . . . or even by the characters, except for Aguirre, whose personality is created as much by [Klaus] Kinski's face and body as by words. What Herzog sees in the story, I think, is what he finds in many of his films: Men haunted by a vision of great achievement, who commit the sin of pride by daring to reach for it, and are crushed by an implacable universe."

• Ebert review: "Aguirre, Wrath of God"

"Apocalypse Now" (1979) directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Ebert wrote in 1999, "[S]een again now at a distance of 20 years, 'Apocalypse Now' is more clearly than ever one of the key films of the century. Most films are lucky to contain a single great sequence. 'Apocalypse Now' strings together one after another, with the river journey as the connecting link. The best is the helicopter attack on a Vietnam village, led by Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall), whose choppers use loudspeakers at top volume to play Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' as they swoop down on a yard full of schoolchildren. Duvall won an Oscar nomination for his performance and its unforgettable line, 'I love the smell of napalm in the morning.' His emptiness is frightening ..."

• Ebert review: "Apocalypse Now"

"Citizen Kane" (1941) directed by Orson Welles

" 'Rosebud' is the emblem of the security, hope and innocence of childhood, which a man can spend his life seeking to regain. It is the green light at the end of Gatsby's pier; the leopard atop Kilimanjaro, seeking nobody knows what; the bone tossed into the air in '2001.' It is that yearning after transience that adults learn to suppress. 'Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get, or something he lost,' says Thompson, the reporter assigned to the puzzle of Kane's dying word. 'Anyway, it wouldn't have explained anything.' True, it explains nothing, but it is remarkably satisfactory as a demonstration that nothing can be explained.

"'Citizen Kane' likes playful paradoxes like that. Its surface is as much fun as any movie ever made. Its depths surpass understanding. I have analyzed it a shot at a time with more than 30 groups, and together we have seen, I believe, pretty much everything that is there on the screen. The more clearly I can see its physical manifestation, the more I am stirred by its mystery."

• Ebert review: "Citizen Kane"

"La Dolce Vita" (1960) directed by Federico Fellini

"Movies do not change, but their viewers do. When I saw 'La Dolce Vita'' in 1960, I was an adolescent for whom 'the sweet life'' represented everything I dreamed of: sin, exotic European glamour, the weary romance of the cynical newspaperman. When I saw it again, around 1970, I was living in a version of Marcello's world; Chicago's North Avenue was not the Via Veneto, but at 3 a.m. the denizens were just as colorful, and I was about Marcello's age.

"When I saw the movie around 1980, Marcello was the same age, but I was 10 years older, had stopped drinking, and saw him not as a role model but as a victim, condemned to an endless search for happiness that could never be found, not that way. By 1991, when I analyzed the film a frame at a time at the University of Colorado, Marcello seemed younger still, and while I had once admired and then criticized him, now I pitied and loved him. And when I saw the movie right after Mastroianni died, I thought that Fellini and Marcello had taken a moment of discovery and made it immortal. There may be no such thing as the sweet life. But it is necessary to find that out for yourself."

• Ebert review" "La Dolce Vita"

"The General" (1927) directed by Buster Keaton

"Buster Keaton was not the Great Stone Face so much as a man who kept his composure in the center of chaos. Other silent actors might mug to get a point across, but Keaton remained observant and collected. That's one reason his best movies have aged better than those of his rival, Charlie Chaplin. He seems like a modern visitor to the world of the silent clowns. ...

"Today I look at Keaton's works more often than any other silent films. They have such a graceful perfection, such a meshing of story, character and episode, that they unfold like music. Although they're filled with gags, you can rarely catch Keaton writing a scene around a gag; instead, the laughs emerge from the situation; he was 'the still, small, suffering center of the hysteria of slapstick,' wrote the critic Karen Jaehne. And in an age when special effects were in their infancy, and a 'stunt' often meant actually doing on the screen what you appeared to be doing, Keaton was ambitious and fearless. He had a house collapse around him. He swung over a waterfall to rescue a woman he loved. He fell from trains. And always he did it in character, playing a solemn and thoughtful man who trusts in his own ingenuity."

• Ebert review: "The General"

"Raging Bull" (1980) directed by Martin Scorsese

" 'Raging Bull' is not a film about boxing but about a man with paralyzing jealousy and sexual insecurity, for whom being punished in the ring serves as confession, penance and absolution. It is no accident that the screenplay never concerns itself with fight strategy. For Jake LaMotta, what happens during a fight is controlled not by tactics but by his fears and drives.

"Consumed by rage after his wife, Vickie, unwisely describes one of his opponents as 'good-looking,' he pounds the man's face into a pulp, and in the audience a Mafia boss leans over to his lieutenant and observes, 'He ain't pretty no more.' After the punishment has been delivered, Jake (Robert De Niro) looks not at his opponent, but into the eyes of his wife (Cathy Moriarty), who gets the message. . . .

" 'Raging Bull' is the most painful and heartrending portrait of jealousy in the cinema -- an 'Othello' for our times. It's the best film I've seen about the low self-esteem, sexual inadequacy and fear that lead some men to abuse women. Boxing is the arena, not the subject. LaMotta was famous for refusing to be knocked down in the ring. There are scenes where he stands passively, his hands at his side, allowing himself to be hammered. We sense why he didn't go down. He hurt too much to allow the pain to stop."

• Ebert review: "Raging Bull

"Tokyo Story" (1953) directed by Yasujiro Ozu

"It is clear that 'Tokyo Story' was one of the unacknowledged masterpieces of the early-1950s Japanese cinema, and that Ozu has more than a little in common with that other great director, Kenji Mizoguchi ('Ugetsu'). Both of them use their cameras as largely impassive, honest observers. Both seem reluctant to manipulate the real time in which their scenes are acted; Ozu uses very restrained editing, and Mizoguchi often shoots scenes in unbroken takes.

"This objectivity creates an interesting effect; because we are not being manipulated by devices of editing and camera movement, we do not at first have any very strong reaction to 'Tokyo Story.' We miss the visual cues and shorthand used by Western directors to lead us by the nose. With Ozu, it's as if the characters are living their lives unaware that a movie is being shot. And so we get to know them gradually, begin to look for personal characteristics and to understand the implications of little gestures and quiet remarks.

" 'Tokyo Story' moves quite slowly by our Western standards, and requires more patience at first than some moviegoers may be willing to supply. Its effect is cumulative, however; the pace comes to seem perfectly suited to the material. And there are scenes that will be hard to forget: The mother and father separately thanking the daughter-in-law for her kindness; the father's laborious drunken odyssey through a night of barroom nostalgia; and his reaction when he learns that his wife will probably die."

• Ebert review" "Tokyo Story"

"The Tree of Life" (2011) directed by Terrence Malick

"Terrence Malick's 'The Tree of Life' is a film of vast ambition and deep humility, attempting no less than to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of a few infinitesimal lives. The only other film I've seen with this boldness of vision is Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey,' and it lacked Malick's fierce evocation of human feeling. There were once several directors who yearned to make no less than a masterpiece, but now there are only a few. Malick has stayed true to that hope ever since his first feature in 1973.

"I don't know when a film has connected more immediately with my own personal experience. In uncanny ways, the central events of 'The Tree of Life' reflect a time and place I lived in, and the boys in it are me. If I set out to make an autobiographical film, and if I had Malick's gift, it would look so much like this."

• Ebert review: "The Tree of Life"

"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) directed by Stanley Kubrick

"The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in '2001: A Space Odyssey,' but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn't include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, '2001' is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe. ...

"The film did not provide the clear narrative and easy entertainment cues the audience expected. The closing sequences, with the astronaut inexplicably finding himself in a bedroom somewhere beyond Jupiter, were baffling. The overnight Hollywood judgment was that Kubrick had become derailed, that in his obsession with effects and set pieces, he had failed to make a movie.

"What he had actually done was make a philosophical statement about man's place in the universe, using images as those before him had used words, music or prayer. And he had made it in a way that invited us to contemplate it -- not to experience it vicariously as entertainment, as we might in a good conventional science-fiction film, but to stand outside it as a philosopher might, and think about it."

• Ebert's review: "2001: A Space Odyssey"

"Vertigo" (1958) directed by Alfred Hitchcock

" 'Vertigo,' which is one of the two or three best films Hitchcock ever made, is the most confessional, dealing directly with the themes that controlled his art. It is *about* how Hitchcock used, feared and tried to control women. He is represented by Scottie (James Stewart), a man with physical and mental weaknesses (back problems, fear of heights), who falls obsessively in love with the image of a woman -- and not any woman, but the quintessential Hitchcock woman. When he cannot have her, he finds another woman and tries to mold her, dress her, train her, change her makeup and her hair, until she looks like the woman he desires. He cares nothing about the clay he is shaping; he will gladly sacrifice her on the altar of his dreams."

• Ebert review: "Vertigo"

For more on Roger Ebert:

• rogerebert.com
• "Life Itself: A Memoir by Roger Ebert (Grand Central)

Roger Ebert’s 20 Most Scathing Movie Reviews

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If there's ever been a film critic who has achieved near-universal respect, it was Roger Ebert . The man loved movies like life itself and not once ever allowed his writing to become lazy or cliché. He wrote from the heart, and it was palpable.

But, the Chicago Sun-Times (from '67 to 2013) critic wasn't enamored with every film to come down the pipeline. After all, the more solid movies one watches, the more they're able to pick up on the flaws of the poor ones. Ebert saw an awful lot of movies, and he wrote an awful lot of words about them. It's just that not all of them were positive, even if, sometimes, the films weren't actually that bad .

20 Alligator (1980)

Roger's rating - 1/4 stars.

When a little girl's parents buy her a pet baby alligator, it's only so long before that thing gets flushed down a toilet. And, for the characters of John Sayles' (who went on to direct excellent indies such as Lone Star ) Alligator , that's far from a good thing. Jackie Brown 's Robert Forster plays the cop on its scaled tail, unless it gobbles him up first.

What Did He Want Out of Alligator?

Well, the man couldn't always be on the money. He gave Alligator just a single star, citing its supposedly poor special effects. He even mentions the alligator emerging from the sewer, which, to this day, actually looks pretty terrific. Plenty of creature features (including Anaconda ) earned outright adoration from Ebert, but what he saw in them, he didn't see in this 1980 film, even if it was very much present. Stream Alligator for free with ads on Tubi.

19 Baby Geniuses (1999)

Roger's rating - 1.5/4 stars.

Baby Geniuses isn't just one of Hollywood's most bizarre movies, it's outright Hollywood's most bizarre franchise . Yet, Kathleen Turner and Christopher Lloyd wisely bowed out of the one theatrical sequel, as they should have with this. The plot follows the test subjects of Babyco, a company which has just learned that, up until the age of two, babies can communicate with one another in extremely eloquent and detailed fashion.

He Described it as Horrifying

Ebert starts his review with, "Bad films are easy to make, but a film as unpleasant as Baby Geniuses achieves a kind of grandeur." Never has the word 'grandeur' carried more bizarre weight. But Baby Geniuses is nothing if not bizarre.

Or, as Ebert concludes the opening paragraph of his review, it's the type of movie where "there is something so fundamentally wrong that our human instincts cry out in protest." Ouch. Rent Baby Geniuses on Prime Video.

18 Bad Boys II (2003)

Everything that many people dislike about Michael Bay was brought to the forefront in his Bad Boys II . Infinitely more mean-spirited, unpleasant, and sometimes outright ignorant than his solid first film , many decisions in this (financially successful) film's construction are somewhat baffling. The plot, what little of it there is, follows Will Smith's Mike Lowrey and Martin Lawrence's Marcus Burnett as they take down a drug kingpin, often in slow motion.

Fortunately, things improved drastically with Bad Boys for Life , which lost Bay as director. Unfortunately, Ebert had already passed away at the time of release. So, his last adventure with the pair of humorous but competent cops was this, a film which he called "cruel" and "distasteful." He wasn't wrong. Stream Bad Boys II on Hulu.

17 Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002)

Roger's rating - .5/4 stars.

Ebert gave Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever just half of one star. So, there wasn't really much of anything about it he found merit in. This includes the mouthful of a title, which is not only difficult for ticket buyers to spout, but makes absolutely no sense.

Aren't We Cool

Ecks and Sever are allies in the film, the whole time, even before either one of them fully realizes it. There's no versus between them. The level of thought that went into the title went into the remainder of the film. As Ebert states , it's not so much a narrative as much as it's a series of explosions book ended by opening and closing credits.

16 Battle: Los Angeles (2011)

Battle: Los Angeles

Not available

It's pretty easy to pinpoint what Battle: Los Angeles wanted to be, even if it's harder to pinpoint just why it fails in every regard. It wants to be Black Hawk Down with aliens, pure and simple. Just look at its whole boots-on-the-ground vibe.

What a Missed Opportunity

But, like audiences at large quickly realized, as did Ebert, not even Aaron Eckhart's main character is as believable or fleshed-out as the side players in Black Hawk Down. By act two, the audience realizes the human characters have as much personality as the unintentionally ugly CGI aliens. So, why would they feel invested in the greater conflict? Rent on AppleTV.

15 Battlefield Earth (2000)

The plot of Battlefield Earth is irrelevant in comparison to the mentality that fueled its construction. It's the Scientology movie, plain and simple. Equipped with Psychlos, horrid dialogue, and devout follower John Travolta (who really hams it up here), that's all it ever really wanted to be. But, instead of spreading whatever Scientology's core message is, it made it a bigger laughingstock than its detractors already found it to be.

Did Ebert See an Upside?

He starts his review with, " Battlefield Earth is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time." So, suffice it to say, he didn't find the viewing a pleasant experience. Which is fair, considering it seems every extra dollar funneled into this thing to make it look more impressive actually just served to make it hideous. Rent Battlefield Earth on Prime Video.

14 The Bucket List (2007)

The Bucket List

The Bucket List really hasn't gotten enough credit for being as rotten as it is. Not even Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, two of the most likable and talented performers ever to grace the silver screen, can elevate it from unpleasant to watchable. The narrative follows two twilight-aged men with very different lives who find themselves facing the same thing: The Big C. Now, it's adventure time before time's no more.

Hollow as Can be

But, unlike fellow Nicholson film Terms of Endearment , The Bucket List doesn't even seem to take cancer seriously. It certainly doesn't bother to make its characters seem like actual humans going through one of the toughest times imaginable. Instead, it wants to be pleasant diversionary fare, but it's hard to be pleasant when that factor is looming large. Rent on AppleTV.

13 Cop Out (2010)

Cop Out follows Bruce Willis' Detective Jimmy Monroe (and never had the actor looked more miserable throughout his storied career) and his partner, Paul (Tracy Morgan) as they try and locate a rare baseball card. The thing is, it's Monroe's card, which he hoped to sell to help pay for his daughter's wedding. They get an opportunity to receive the card, but first, they have to carry out a mission for a scummy gangster.

Insert Pun About the Title Here

Cop Out is the only film Kevin Smith has helmed that he himself did not write, and that shows. Even if someone doesn't find themselves on Smith's wavelength, a specific wavelength is preferable to a big bag of nothing. Like audiences in general, Ebert found Cop Out to be nothing more than a deeply unfunny series of poop jokes. For a film about two grown men trying to solve a crime, there are a ton of juvenile jokes. Rightly so, Ebert considered juvenile to be a decent adjective for the movie as a whole. Rent on AppleTV.

12 Dungeons & Dragons (2000)

Since the game was blowing up in the late '90s, why not craft a film for the early aughts? Too bad Dungeons & Dragons appealed to neither fans nor general audiences. Not everyone has the taste for ham...and the 2000 D&D film is a full pig roast.

It Seemed Like an Okay Idea at the Time

Ebert compared the movie to a junior high school play. When a studio funnels a ton of money into a film with the hopes it will succeed, that's basically the last thing higher-ups want to read from America's most famous film critic. That said, at least he notes that Jeremy Irons has a ton of fun hamming it up. Stream Dungeons & Dragons for free with ads on YouTube.

11 Freddy Got Fingered (2001)

Freddy Got Fingered

Roger's rating - 0/4 stars.

There isn't much of a plot in Freddy Got Fingered . Really, it's one of the hardest movies to explain, especially in terms of why someone would like it (they are out there, it's an understandable cult favorite oddity). Basically, the meat is that a ridiculously immature 28-year-old man has issues with his daddy ("Would you like some sausage? Daddy, would you like some sau-sa-ges?").

A Crass Culmination

Freddy Got Fingered made a profit, but Ebert certainly couldn't see how that might come to fruition. He saw the film as the crass culmination of other late '90s and early aughts' films such as See Spot Run (which might just get a mention soon), Monkeybone , Joe Dirt , and Tomcats . In other words, he thought less of it than he did those films, and he most certainly did not like those films. Rent on AppleTV.

10 Godzilla (1998)

Admittedly, and it may be a controversial take, but Roland Emmerich's Godzilla has aged extraordinarily well. If one looks at films like entities trying to accomplish a mission, Godzilla 's was simple: entertain . It does an amazing job of that, with underappreciated pacing, a terrific first attack on Manhattan, and a fun performance from Jean Reno.

Are there elements that still don't work? Absolutely. But, with the MonsterVerse in full swing, giving G-Fans the Big-G they're accustomed to, the sting of disappointment that surrounded Emmerich's film has all but disappeared, allowing it to serve on its own as both a rollercoaster ride and a late '90s timepiece.

Ebert's Thoughts?

Basically, he made a fair comparison to Jurassic Park . Godzilla (1998) isn't so much Godzilla as it is an attempt to replicate the success of that Steven Spielberg masterpiece. It doesn't quite succeed in that goal, and Ebert was quick to cite the film's special effects, especially how they're shrouded in darkness and rain and, far more often than not, Zilla rushes off the screen.

But, in fairness to the film, that helps seal the effect of a big lizard being able to conceal itself below ground in one of the most populated cities on Earth. Stream Godzilla on Max.

RELATED: Godzilla Minus One Director Reveals His Thoughts On Panned 1998 Godzilla Film

9 The Hot Chick (2002)

The Hot Chick (2002)

For a little while there, Hollywood was trying its best to make Rob Schneider a leading man. And, considering The Hot Chick is the best of his few leading man movies, it's not very surprising things didn't pan out. Yet, just because The Hot Chick is slightly more intelligent than Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo and the baffling The Animal doesn't mean it really possesses merit. That is, besides giving Anna Faris a major role outside Scary Movie and doing a little more to increase Rachel McAdams' exposure.

Switch-a-Ooh, This Is Forgettable

It wasn't a distaste for the body swap movie that turned Ebert off on The Hot Chick , it was this particular one's treatment of female characters. Basically, the women characters in The Hot Chick have very little to do other than openly fantasize about a phallus. In other words, he saw it as the nadir of an already pretty weak sub-genre. Stream on Hulu.

8 Jason X (2001)

If Ebert seemed to have a distaste for any one genre in particular, it was absolutely horror. More often than not, when writing about the genre, he was either harsh or dismissive. But, in the case of Friday the 13th , he made the irresponsible decision of posting performer Betsy Palmer's address just so they could harass her about staring in it. It wasn't a great look, and Ebert never warmed up to the franchise (which, with 12 movies combined, is less harmful than posting someone's, fortunately inaccurate, address).

The Nadir of His Least-Favorite Franchise

So, basically, Jason X was decidedly not the critic's favorite of the year. And, considering even die-hard Friday the 13th fans hate the thing, maybe it can't all be chalked up to franchise bias. That said, he did give some praise to the liquid nitrogen kill.

7 Kick-Ass (2010)

Roger Ebert wasn't alone in his repulse to Matthew Vaughn's Kick-Ass . Heck, there are some people out there, like those who went to see the midnight showing (because those were a thing at the time) during their senior year of high school, that left questioning the film's core ethical code. After all, hearing a little girl drop the "C Word" is... a lot.

What Didn't He Like?

Yet, unpleasant as it can be at first, it doesn't take long to gravitate to Kick-Ass ' level. Not to mention, with her immediate subsequent roles, Chloë Grace Moretz continued to show herself to be both an incredible talent and an old soul, so the sour taste of her language and actions in Kick-Ass is, or has become, diluted. But, even still, the character of Hit Girl rubbed Ebert the wrong way . Rent on AppleTV.

6 The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

The Twilight Saga never received Ebert's love, but there was only one he outright hated. And fair enough, because his main criticism was that it was stagnant more often than not. And, considering The Twilight Saga: New Moon is the only one that truly feels like a placeholder (okay, maybe Breaking Dawn Part 1 , as well), it's a criticism shared by many others. In Ebert's words, the characters in New Moon "should be arrested for loitering with intent to moan." A film without momentum is just money on a screen.

How Did He Feel About the Others?

Ebert gave the first film two-and-a-half stars out of four. His biggest gripe was that the acting wasn't always believable, but he seemed to admire the film's spirit. He was a little harsher on The Twilight Saga: Eclipse , which followed New Moon , but not as harsh as he was on that second film. He just felt that, while seeing Bella quiver and shiver in front of Edward has its appeal for fans, it was running out of steam (and there were two more flicks to go).

RELATED: New Moon Director Says Taylor Swift Tried to Get a Role in the Film

5 Pearl Harbor (2001)

War films tend to receive accolades. Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor , however, was seen as merely an excuse to put pretty people on a poster. Of course, Bay's film is a cinematic retelling of the attack on Pearl Harbor. But, even more than that (way more than that), it's desperately trying to be the love triangle version of Titanic (Rose wasn't exactly conflicted, so not a triangle).

At Least it Led to a Great Team America Joke

Ebert found Bay's film, like a few other Bay films, bloated as can be. He also figured it to be hackneyed, awkwardly-written, and "directed without grace."

In other words, he saw it as the intended moneymaker it is, not the accurate retelling of American history it should have been. What a waste of Josh Hartnett's considerable talent (and, frankly, this should have damaged Ben Affleck's career, not Hartnett's, but it absolutely did to the latter). Stream Pearl Harbor on Max.

4 See Spot Run (2001)

See Spot Run follows David Arquette's Gordon Smith, a mailman always going toe to toe with pups. When his cute neighbor's kid needs a babysitter, he leaps at the opportunity, but he's really babysitting two. The boy, and a constantly-pooping police pup who has just scurried from his witness protection situation (WITSEC for a dog? Alright).

See Ticket Buyers Run

In his one-and-a-half star review, Ebert called the unfunny comedy "desperate," "excruciating," and filled with farts. Well, fart jokes... if the term joke can actually be used for that kind of thing. Suffice it to say, Ebert felt he was too old for this, and he felt everyone else with their age in the double digits would feel much the same.

3 Thir13en Ghosts (2001)

Thirteen Ghosts

Thir13en Ghosts follows Arthur, the widowed nephew of a seemingly-deceased famous ghost hunter who is left the latter's massive mansion. A mansion that, in a way, functions as a clock...with moving pieces and all. But, not all is as it appears, and if the ghost-filled house doesn't kill Arthur Kriticos (Tony Shalhoub, looking absolutely miserable) and his family, his bloodline will.

There Are More Than Thir13en Reasons to Never Watch This

Okay, it's not that awful, it just takes a lot of big swings and doesn't really land them. But, without a doubt, there are at least two death scenes in this film that are legitimately well-crafted, unique, and memorable. But Ebert didn't even see merit in that brand of creativity, as he was more focused on just how loud and empty this ghost house actually is. To that point, he called Thir13en Ghosts "literally painful." Rent on AppleTV.

2 Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

The issues Ebert had with Bad Boys II he had with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen . A film laced with so much bombast it's overwhelming by the end of the first act, Revenge of the Fallen is essentially a plotless film. It just wants to entertain and, frankly, it doesn't even do that.

A Soulless Endeavor

Really, the same thing, that it seeks to entertain, could be said of the first film. And, there, the mission was accomplished. But Revenge of the Fallen , when it isn't suffering from slow stretches, is steamrolled by some seriously ignorant characterizations (e.g. Mudflap). The vast majority of the film did nothing for Ebert, which couldn't have been more accurately summarized than with his calling it "of unbearable length."

1 Wild Wild West (1999)

Wild Wild West

Will Smith was on the top of the world when Wild Wild West was released. That much is obvious, even just looking at the fact this movie didn't kill his career . But, really, this is the exact type of movie that kills careers, to the letter. Bloated, poorly written, it makes Kenneth Branagh look like a weak actor, and it was clearly built by committee. After all, the whole mechanical spider thing was supposed to be in Tim Burton's Superman Lives . It's as if the studio needed a tent pole and hoped this would be it.

"A Comedy Dead Zone"

It's astonishing Smith passed on The Matrix in favor of Wild Wild West . Even if just analyzing the scripts, one works and one (even on the page) clearly does not. Ebert gave it ( Wild Wild West , not The Matrix ) a single star, citing in particular its ineffective comedic beats and the uncomfortable gelling of cyberpunk elements with the Western genre.

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Roger ebert in review: a 'fresh air' survey.

Fresh Air remembers the film critic and bon vivant Roger Ebert, who died Thursday, with a roundup of interviews from our archive -- one with Ebert alone, one with him and his late partner Gene Siskel, and two in which Ebert interviews iconic directors. Plus, critic-at-large John Powers discusses Ebert's 2011 memoir Life Itself.

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April 5, 2013

Guests: Roger Ebert - Roger Ebert & Gene Siskel - Roger Ebert & Martin Scorsese - Roger Ebert & Francis Ford Coppola

TERRY GROSS, HOST:This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Today, we remember film critic Roger Ebert.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SNEAK PREVIEWS")

ROGER EBERT: Across the aisle from me, Gene Siskel, film critic of the Chicago Tribune.

GENE SISKEL: And this is Roger Ebert, film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times.

GROSS: That's how Roger Ebert and his rival Chicago film critic the late Gene Siskel used to introduce each other on their PBS program "Sneak Previews," the show that made them famous in the late '70s. Ebert died yesterday at the age of 70, just a few days after blogging that a painful fracture that had made it difficult to walk was diagnosed as cancer.

His life and his body had already been dramatically altered by cancer of the thyroid, salivary glands and chin, which was first diagnosed in 2002. It left him unable to speak or eat. But he kept writing about films on his blog and social media, reaching a big and appreciative audience.

We're going to listen back to an interview with Ebert, as well as an interview with Ebert and Siskel. And we'll hear excerpts of onstage interviews Ebert conducted with Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola about two of Ebert's favorite films, "Raging Bull" and "Apocalypse Now." Our critic-at-large John Powers says that Ebert will be remembered for his enthusiasm, his openness, his generosity to filmmakers and to his fellow critics, and for his canny knack of taking his work into new media.

We're going to start with a piece John recorded about Ebert in September 2011, after the publication of Ebert's memoir "Life Itself."

JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: You can divide famous people into two broad categories: those who find fame a burden and those who take it like a tonic. Roger Ebert is one of the latter. That rarest of creatures, a film critic who everyone knows, he really enjoys being Roger Ebert.

This pleasure comes through in his new memoir, "Life Itself." Perhaps goaded into existence by the cancer that has assailed him in recent years, it tells the life story of the man with the most famous thumb in America, pausing along the way to offer the author's views on everything from the glories of black-and-white cinematography to the existence of God to the comedy of being fat.

The book is chatty, upbeat and structurally loose - which is to say that it sounds exactly like Roger Ebert. He was born 69 years ago in Urbana, Illinois, and enjoyed a classic middle-American childhood, idyllic but tinged with darkness.

He had an electrician father, Walter, whom he obviously adored; and a mother, Annabel, who treated him kindly but also scared him with her anger, especially once she became an alcoholic, a drinking problem that Ebert himself would share and eventually conquer.

A lifelong liberal, Ebert had dreamed of being a feisty newspaper columnist like Mike Royko. But his life took a very different turn in 1967 when, much to his surprise, he was named film critic for The Chicago Sun-Times. He was all of 25 years old, and he seized the job like a brass ring.

His career took off quickly - he'd won the Pulitzer Prize by age 33 - and he began accumulating a vast storehouse of anecdotes. He gives career advice to the young Oprah Winfrey, hangs out with the old Robert Mitchum, and scripts the movie "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" for skinflick meister Russ Meyer, whose own account of their collaboration makes you suspect that Ebert is giving us the PG version.

Still, he would have remained a minor local celebrity had it not been for the 1975 creation of the movie review show "Sneak Previews," with fellow Chicago critic Gene Siskel, a competitive man of burning ambition, whom Ebert portrays with surprising generosity.

The show wasn't Ebert's idea, but it changed him and our culture, not always for the best. The trademark feature of "Sneak Previews" was that moment when Ebert and Siskel gave movies thumbs up or thumbs down, a hugely influential shtick that reduced film criticism to a simple-minded consumer guide in which ideas barely matter.

Yet while I know scads of critics who dislike that show, I'm not sure I know any who dislike or blame Ebert. They think that's just Roger. And Roger has never been one of those critics you read for his analysis. He's a critic you read for his openness and enthusiasm. Because of that enthusiasm, you might almost say that he's the original fanboy: breezy, personal, ready to share.

This may help explain why, after cancer forced him from his TV show, he reinvented himself as a hugely successful blogger, weighing in on everything from movies to politics to what he sees as the ruination of his newspaper by idiots. It's probably the best writing he's ever done.

And it's all the more impressive because life dealt him a hard blow with a disease that keeps him from eating, drinking or talking, three things he obviously loved. But rather than sinking into a funk or hiding away, he's gone on with his life, and one of the many admirable features of his new book is its sunniness. It's wholly free from the complaining and self-pity so popular in memoirs these days.

That's just what you'd hope for from a guy who was raised, and thrived, in the very heart of the American century. Ebert is anything but provincial. "Life Itself" begins with a reference to Ingmar Bergman's film "Persona," and ends by quoting Tintin's dog, Milou.

But reading this book, I was struck by how deeply he's inscribed with our national character; the decency and good humor and happy acceptance of other cultures, the recognition that the world has murky depths he'd just as soon not dwell on, above all, the eagerness to engage with life. You see, unlike a lot of film critics, Roger Ebert knows that there's more to living than just sitting in the dark.

GROSS: That was our critic-at-large John Powers, recorded in 2011, after the publication of Roger Ebert's memoir "Life Itself." I had the pleasure of interviewing Ebert several times. Here's an excerpt of the interview we recorded in 1984, when he and Gene Siskel were co-hosting their syndicated movie review program "At the Movies."

Viewers may have thought of Ebert and Siskel as a team because they appeared together on their weekly show, but they were also rival film critics for rival Chicago newspapers. Ebert told me they regarded each other more as competitors than partners.

EBERT: He works for the Tribune. I work for the Sun Times. One day a week, we do the show. The other six days of the week, we are, indeed, competitors. So Siskel and I have been both covering the movies in Chicago for 16 years together, and I started two years before him. So it goes back a long way. In fact, when I was asked originally if I would like to do a show with Gene Siskel, my answer was: Why Gene Siskel?

GROSS: Well, did you ever ask yourself what did you do to deserve such as a fate as having to work so closely with your biggest rival?

EBERT: There could be worse fates. Gene Siskel is intelligent. He's well-informed. He's a good film critic, and I respect him. And when we are doing our discussions on the air, we do them ad-lib, unrehearsed, spontaneous and first draft, for the most part, unless some terrible mistake takes place.

And I'm glad to be able to have him sitting across the aisle from me, because I get a lot of feedback, and we can talk well together. I think I would feel bad if I had to do the show with somebody who didn't seem to be listening to what I said and wasn't responding to me, but was just simply waiting for me to shut up so that he could start.

GROSS: Before you became a professional, before you started writing for newspapers or anything, did you have a desire to make movies or to write about them as a critic?

EBERT: No. Like a lot of people who started to read in the late '50s, I wanted to be a novelist. I mean, the heroes when I was going to school may have been film directors like Antonioni and Fellini, but they were also novelists like Philip Roth. Katherine Anne Porter just had a new book out at that time.

I started reading in high school, and, I mean, I read - I started reading, I think, at the age of six, you know. But in high school, I came across the works of Thomas Wolfe at just the right age. I think I was 13-and-a-half. And this image of this tortured, romantic figure writing novels while standing up and writing on the top of the refrigerator and walking through the dawn saying I wrote 10,000 words tonight, that was me. You know, I went for that.

And Kerouac, "On the Road," books like that. And when I was 15-and-a-half, I started writing sports for the News Gazette in Champaign-Urbana. A sports columnist in Philadelphia, a man named Bill Lyon, also worked on the News Gazette at the same time. I covered Urbana. He covered Champaign. He was into Thomas Wolfe, too.

And we would work all night on our stories. We're covering some high school football game, but the lead would have to be perfect. Every word would have to be filled with a passion. You know, Thomas Wolfe covers the Urbana Tigers and the Champaign Maroons. And during the game every year when Champaign played Urbana, you know, it was like Dante was covering it, especially if you lost.

GROSS: Speaking with film critic Roger Ebert. Did your parents try to influence your movie-going habits?

EBERT: I think I had a real good relationship with my parents about the movies. I went to a lot of movies. And then there comes the time in everybody's life when you just go to the movies that you feel like going to. That first time your parents drop you off at the multiplex so you can see "Oh Heavenly Dog" starring Benji, and you sneak in to see "Saturday Night Fever" instead, that's one of the initiation processes into adulthood.

GROSS: Were there movies that you started to define yourself by, you know, like this movie really says something about who I am?

EBERT: That happened to me as I was in the last years of high school and the first years of college. There were art theaters in Champaign-Urbana, and also the university had a film society. And I started going to the angry young men films like "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning," "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" in which, frankly, you know, as a high school kid in Urbana, I had very little in common with this borstal boy played by Tom Courtenay, but to me, you know, that movie was my story. It's the "Bonnie and Clyde" line, you know, where Clyde says: You know what you did? You told my story.

I went to see "La Dolce Vita" by Fellini, and that movie has been a touchstone for me, because when I saw it in 1960, there was this 30-year-old journalist in Rome leading this unbelievably glamorous life with all these celebrities and staying up all night and going to orgies and having all of his philosophical friends around him and his wives and his mistresses and miracles and stories to cover.

When I saw it again - and I've seen it every 10 years - in 1970, it was somebody about my age, only he was leading a more interesting life than I was, I thought. And when I saw it again in 1980, it was somebody 10 years younger than I was, and he had a lot of problems that I had outgrown.

So Marcello, the character in the movie, stays the same, and I can kind of measure, you know, my thoughts about the character as time goes by.

GROSS: You've interviewed a lot of stars in the years that you've been writing about movies. Do they ever make ridiculous demands of you about what they will or won't do, what they won't talk about? And if that happens, how do you handle it?

EBERT: In general, no, they don't. In the book, there's an interview with Jerry Lewis at the Cannes Film Festival. He got out a tape recorder. He tape-recorded it, apparently out of paranoia. What I am astounded by is the number of occasions where totally unexpected and startling things happen that the star does nothing at all to conceal.

Another interview in this book is with Tony Curtis, also at the Cannes Film Festival. I went to interview him, and during the course of the interview, he looked out the window of his hotel room, saw a woman on the sidewalk that he found attractive and started screaming at her to come up to his room. He was shouting his name and his room number in full view and hearing of about 500 people on the terrace of the Carlton Hotel. He was really out of control that day. And when I left, I had a very strange encounter to record.

Movie stars have been interviewed so often, that sometimes you find some very revealing things happening because the interviewer is almost not visible to them.

GROSS: What do you mean?

EBERT: That there's always been an interviewer there. I mean, Robert Mitchum has been a movie actor for 40 years. If I'm sitting in the back seat of his car, is he going to be thinking oh, my God, the press is here? No, the press has always been there. You know, 20 years ago it was Rex Reed. Forty years ago, it was Louella Parsons. You know, in a way, the press has always been in Robert Mitchum's back seat, and so if you can adopt the fly-on-the-wall approach of just kind of quietly sitting there and observing everything that's going on, you are going to see somebody who is not especially monitoring his behavior.

GROSS: Roger Ebert, recorded in 1984. Coming up, we continue our remembrance of Ebert with a 1996 interview with Ebert and Gene Siskel. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. We're remembering film critic Roger Ebert, who died yesterday at the age of 70. Ebert first became famous for hosting a weekly TV series in which he and rival film critic Gene Siskel reviewed new films. They remained TV partners until Siskel's death in 1999 of brain cancer.

I spoke with Ebert and Siskel in 1996, onstage in their hometown of Chicago, at a benefit for public radio station WBEZ in Chicago. Our interview included clips from their favorite films. I asked Ebert to introduce the film he chose.

EBERT: I had originally picked a different scene. I picked the scene with Orson Welles being discovered by the cat in the doorway in "The Third Man." And then my esteemed colleague here pointed out that that scene doesn't have any dialogue in it, and so it probably wouldn't play very well on the radio.

EBERT: We could have a kind of a United Nations translation: OK, now Orson Welles is smiling at Joseph Cotten, you know. So I granted Gene his point. It was a pretty good point.

EBERT: And I thought a little harder, and I thought of my favorite passage of dialogue in the movies, and it's from "Citizen Kane," but I don't want to tell you what it is. It's from "Citizen Kane." It's Mr. Bernstein, who is a person who has been - who began with Charles Foster Kane. He was there before, as he says earlier in this same scene: I was there before the beginning, and now I'm here after the end. And this is the speech that I like so much.

GROSS: OK, let's watch it.

(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "CITIZEN KANE")

EVERETT SLOANE: (as Mr. Bernstein) Who's a busy man? Me? I'm chairman of the board. I've got nothing but time. What do you want to know?

WILLIAM ALLAND: (as Jerry Thompson) Well, Mr. Bernstein, we thought maybe if we could find out what he meant by that last words, as he was dying.

SLOANE: (as Bernstein) That Rosebud, huh? Maybe some girl? There were a lot of them back in the early days.

ALLAND: (as Thompson) It's hardly likely, Mr. Bernstein, that Mr. Kane could have met some girl casually, and then 50 years later on this death bed, remember.

SLOANE: (as Bernstein) Well, you're pretty young, Mr. Thompson. A fellow would remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in. And on it, there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress, she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all. But I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl.

EBERT: Yeah.

GROSS: Now tell us more about what thrills you about the dialogue in that.

EBERT: Well, I saw the movie for the first time in 1958, and there hasn't been a month go by since then...

EBERT: ...that I haven't thought about that dialogue, because in one little speech in a popular Hollywood film written by Herman Mankiewicz, you have the mystery of memory and of longing and of the fact that we are all, to some degree, alone and trying to reach out to somebody else.

And then you have time. You're a young man, Mr. Thompson, he says. And the more I think about that, if you - the more you think about that speech, the more it's about the human condition. It's about the whole thing.

GROSS: I'd like to go through some firsts, like do a little, like, film biography of each of you. So let's move through these quickly. The first film you actually remember seeing in a movie theater.

SISKEL: Well, it would probably a Disney picture. And the one that stands out for me for the emotional impact was "Dumbo," specifically the sequence where Mrs. Jumbo is chained up. It's a beautiful sequence. The laughter is misplaced.

SISKEL: It's a laughter on the title, but it's one of the most beautiful, powerful sequences in the movies, and that is of course when Mrs. Jumbo is - we're talking about separation between child and mother.

And the - she sings. She later will sing with her trunk woven in through the bars, one of the most beautiful lullabies, "Baby Mine." And clearly, every child fears - and the Disney animated features always play on it - parental loss. And that was a very powerful thing for me growing up.

GROSS: Roger, your first film you remember seeing in a movie theater.

EBERT: My father took me to see the Marx Brothers in "A Day at the Races." He loved the Marx Brothers. He had seen the Marx Brothers on stage in Champaign-Urbana when he was a young man in vaudeville.

GROSS: Was it funny to you?

EBERT: No, to me, the scene that I liked the very best - I was really scared when Groucho got on the horse. I was afraid he would fall off and get hurt. But the scene I remember the best is Harpo looking at me while he played the harp. He was looking straight out of the screen. He nodded at the camera. And I thought he saw me. And he was saying, look, I'm playing the harp. And I didn't know what a harp was. I'd never seen one before. And I was entranced.

GROSS: The movie that most scared you as a child, that you...

SISKEL: I think I answered that question. Particularly, I will say when Timothy J. - when Dumbo's up there, and, you know, can he fly or not? Now, here, you're talking about a childhood fantasy. I mean, obviously it's a fantasy for everyone, flying, but unassisted - but he could die. He could be - certainly, he could be humiliated. And, again, this is a thing that a child would relate to.

EBERT: Gene was thinking: Some day, I want to work with a guy like Dumbo.

GROSS: Roger, the...

SISKEL: Too obvious.

GROSS: The film that first really scared you.

SISKEL: Charitable mood. Twentieth anniversary, what the hell. You know, let it go.

EBERT: When I was 10, I saw "The Thing," the Howard Hawks picture. It scared me cold. I was terrified during the movie and for days afterwards. But...

GROSS: Because of the way they burn The Thing and set it on fire?

EBERT: Oh, the whole - the way he melted, and you could see that he was still alive.

GROSS: What do you do with the vegetable? You cook it?

EBERT: The moment when they form hands in a circle in the ice, and then you get the overhead shot, and you see that there's a ship underneath the ice. Everything in that movie terrified me. You know, among modern pictures, the first "Halloween" was a very scary picture.

SISKEL: Very.

EBERT: Gene saw it at the Village Theater when he was living two blocks away, and he took a cab home.

SISKEL: I took a cab - absolutely true, absolutely true. (unintelligible), and I was living at 1400 North State, and I - it's a little more than two blocks, but about four. And I will tell you I took a taxi home. And when I got in - and we've all done this after scary movies, I hope - I went to the shower and pulled the curtain back.

SISKEL: Absolutely true.

EBERT: And believe me, there was nobody in the shower.

SISKEL: I was about 30 at the time. That sounds normal, doesn't it?

EBERT: Knowing the kind of housekeeper you were, it was probably a frightening sight in that shower, anyway.

SISKEL: That was scary. That was scary.

GROSS: The first movie you reviewed.

EBERT: "The Last Wave." It was a French film.

GROSS: I thought it was an Australian film. Oh, this is a different one.

EBERT: No, no, that's a different "Last Wave."

And I remember "The Last Wave." That the Aborigines. No, this was 1967, and my review was: Ah, yes, here it is, the French New Wave rolling ashore once again. You see, my first review, and I was already blase.

SISKEL: My first review was of Walt Disney's "Rascal"...

GROSS: Boy, a real Disney thing here.

SISKEL: ...starring Billy Mumy. He was the child actor in "Lost in Space." It was about a pet raccoon. And I really had to deal with the issue very quickly of hating that picture and being bold enough to say, off the gun, you know, you're sort of knocking mom and apple pie. And I went right at it.

GROSS: Was that hard the first time you gave a negative review...

SISKEL: That was in late August - I think it was August 29th, 1969.

GROSS: Now, your first review was a negative review. Roger, was it hard the first time you wrote a negative review?

GROSS: You didn't think: I'm hurting people's career, people worked really hard on this movie, they're probably decent human beings? This represents...

SISKEL: I had that test come up.

GROSS: ...this is a heartfelt effort, even though the product isn't very good?

EBERT: You have to realize you're not writing for the filmmakers. You're writing for the potential film audience. And I would much rather hurt somebody's feelings who made the picture than send somebody to see a movie and spend two hours of their life seeing a movie that I don't think is worth seeing.

GROSS: Roger Ebert with Gene Siskel in 1996. Ebert died yesterday. Our remembrance continues in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross. This is FRESH AIR, and this is NPR.

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Today we're remembering film critic Roger Ebert. He died yesterday at the age of 70, just a few days after blogging that a painful fracture that had made it difficult to walk was diagnosed as cancer.

We're going to listen back to an excerpt of the interview Ebert conducted with one of his favorite film directors, Francis Ford Coppola, about one of his famous favorite films, "Apocalypse Now." The interview was recorded at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, after the screening of the re-edited and restored version of this classic film, which is set during the Vietnam War.

Let's start with a clip. Marlon Brando, who plays the renegade Colonel Kurtz, is recalling an atrocity at a village. After American soldiers inoculated the village children with a polio vaccine, the Viet Cong arrived and hacked off the children's arms.

(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "APOCALYPSE NOW")

MARLON BRANDO: (as Colonel Kurtz) There they were in a pile - a pile of little arms. And I remember, I, I, I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized, like I was shot, like I was shot with a diamond - a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God, the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men, trained cadres, these men who fought with their hearts, who have families, who have children, who are filled with love, but they had the strength, the strength, to do that.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

EBERT: At the time we saw it here, and I saw it in the old Palais, and I think it was my greatest film-going experience at Cannes because I had spine-tingling, I mean literally, I mean not figuratively but real tingles. At the time we were so filled with stories about the production. All the lore about Brando, for example. Now, seeing it again, after 22 years, all that's forgotten, it's all water under the bridge. Brando's performance seems to so strong to me and so - just in the right note and just handled right by you. And all the gossip about, you know, how much he weighed or, you know, every time Brando does anything there are a million stories from the set, had all just faded away leaving this pure and great performance. How did you feel seeing it again? Because you had to work with Brando and deal with them and so forth.

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: Well, you know, he's an extraordinary man. And beyond as - the roles of films that we know, just what he talks about and the way his mind thinks, it's true. I could tell you so many stories. I don't want to overstay my welcome, but the truth of the matter is Marlon is like a kid and he's very lazy and he doesn't like to work, and he also gets embarrassed and he gets stage fright. So when he arrived, you know, he was very big and I immediate - you know, in film you always have problems and part of your job as a director is to see how you can make the problem be an advantage. So I immediately suggested, well, Marlon, why don't you play it as this is big fat guy and have one arm around a beautiful girl and another with a mango that you're eating and show him as a man who has surrendered to the jungle and to the lusts of life. But Marlon is very shy about his weight. He says, no, no, no, I can't do that. I don't want to be like fat and stuff. I said OK.

Well, I - I couldn't have him be as it was written, a kind of a Green Beret colonel in uniform because, you know, where would he have gotten the uniform that could fit him, you know? So the idea I had - in movies, you know, very often you're looking at the actor from the waist up. And in a movie if you're broad, if you have big shoulders, you know, even like Roger, if you're broad, that in your mind, you assume him to be a big man, a giant - not necessarily heavy. So I thought if I shot him from - in that attitude and then when I showed him full, had a double who was like six foot six, it would make Kurtz be like a giant man rather than like me, you know? So that was the philosophy I took as a solution. The second issue was that Marlon, I wanted it to be like the character Kurtz in the book, and Marlon immediately said that would never work.

You know, so finally I started getting, you know, well, why wouldn't it work and, you know, blah, blah, blah. One day, the fifth day, I come in and I'm astonished. There he is and he's cut off all his hair, which is the image of Kurtz from the book. And I said Marlon, what happened? I said you're going to do it like Kurtz. He says, yeah, I think doing it like Kurtz is the best way. I said but you told me that wouldn't work. You said you read the book and it would never work. He says, well, I didn't read the book. I said but you told me you did. He said, well, I lied.

So, so that's like what it is to work with Marlon. But - but his instincts are so great that - and many of our talks led to opinions and ideas and he evolved what he needed in order to do that performance, and he should be commended...

EBERT: It's just right because when you get to this legendary character in "The Heart of Darkness," you really don't want to just have him standing there like a person who exists as in the same dimension as the other people in the film. He has to emerge out of some other kind of idea, I think.

COPPOLA: Well, he also knew - Marlon even said to me - that I, he says you've painted yourself into a corner, haven't you? And what he meant was that as I made the film going up the river, I was making it more surreal, you know, with the colored smoke and the style it had. And by making it more surreal, a normal "Guns of Navarone" ending wouldn't have worked anymore, so I had painted myself into a corner and I didn't know how to get out. And he knew that I had done that and I think in a, you know, he likes to kid around and stuff or he's a big practical joker, but I think that early process of trying to find the ending was his working really at it.

GROSS: Roger Ebert interviewing Francis Ford Coppola at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001. We'll hear an excerpt of Ebert interviewing Martin Scorsese after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. We're remembering film critic Roger Ebert, who died yesterday. One of Ebert's top 10 films was "Raging Bull," directed by Martin Scorsese. In 1997, Ebert interviewed Scorsese about that film at the Wexner Center for the Arts on the campus of Ohio State University.

EBERT: "Raging Bull" came out in '80 and it is a great film. It is a film that will live as long as films are seen.

And I think that...

MARTIN SCORSESE: Thank you. Thank you.

EBERT: What I feel so strongly in talking to people about movies, frequently people will - they know I'm a movie critic - they will discuss the subject matter as if that is what the film is about. Oh, it's a film about boxing.

SCORSESE: Yeah, I know. Right.

EBERT: Or, oh, it's a film about gangsters.

SCORSESE: Right. Right.

EBERT: Or whatever. You know, like when they hear what "Breaking the Waves" is about. Oh, I don't know if I want to see it. A film is not about its subject. It's about how its about its subject.

SCORSESE: Right. In fact, when...

EBERT: A subject is neutral. People don't understand that. When people say, whenever anybody makes a statement, I don't like to go to movies about and then fill in the blank...

SCORSESE: Yeah. Yeah.

EBERT: ...my response is, anyone who makes that statement is an idiot.

SCORSESE: No, its true.

It's true. It's true.

EBERT: I don't want to go to bad films about cowboys.

SCORSESE: Yeah.

EBERT: I don't want to go to bad films about boxers.

SCORSESE: I know.

EBERT: I would like to see a good film about a boxer might be a more intelligent statement.

SCORSESE: Yeah. I mean when Bob gave me the book originally, it's back in 1974, I never had saw - I never saw a fight scene, I never saw a fight. My father was a big fight fan. But I never, I didn't know anything about boxing and I wasn't interested in films about boxing, you know. But it took those years to - for me to go my own way, to come back to understanding really what it was about.

EBERT: It wasn't - it was about a boxer but it wasn't about boxing.

SCORSESE: Right.

EBERT: It was about the boxer.

SCORSESE: It was about a man. Yeah.

EBERT: Could you set this up just a little bit by talking about two things? Number one, what people don't always - they observe viscerally but not necessarily intellectually - how much technique went into the boxing sequences, in terms of slow motion and lenses and movement of camera.

SCORSESE: Well, what happened with the boxing sequences, once I saw De Niro perform the nine fights - they had - Jake LaMotta and Jimmy Nickerson worked out blocking for nine fight scenes. And he showed them to me in Gleason's Gym on 14th Street, and I sat there, I was stunned. In fact, he came over to me. He says, are you watching? Because I'm killing myself. I said, yeah, I am.

And I realized, I said, oh boy, I said - because he didn't know. He thought it - he thought I was like, you know, hanging around not watching. I'm watching, I'm watching, I realized you can't shoot this. You can't shoot this from my angle. I said we have to be in there with him and its got to be "The Wild Bunch." It's got to be - every punch has to be worked out in such a way, well, let's say not every punch, but you have to do it like music. You have to do it like I did some of the musical sequences in "New York, New York," where three bars of music was one shot, literally. Not four cameras and then you cut it together in the editing room. That's selecting, not directing. It's a different thing, you know?

But directing is, you know, these four punches, one, two, three, four, camera tracks from left to right, swings around, over the shoulder of the guy who is getting hit, and we see a close-up of LaMotta hitting him. And it's got to be a arc, shoom, like this, and as fast as the punches.

And the most important thing was that the camera never, as much as possible, never goes outside the ring - that you're always in the ring with him. Your sensibility is taken on by - his vision becomes your sensibility. In other words, what he perceives in the ring, sometimes I open the ring up. We had a ring that I built special where I made it longer and sometimes wider and it was like, it was like being - imagine being punched in the head, what you hear and what you perceive. You don't know where you are.

EBERT: And on the soundtrack you used breaking glass...

SCORSESE: Breaking glass...

EBERT: And animal noises.

SCORSESE: Animal noises and that sort of thing. Frank Warner did that. He wouldn't tell us after a while what he was using. He said, I'm not going to tell anybody, you know. Whatever it is, it's great - that sort of thing.

But it did take, we had planned five and a half weeks of shooting for it, it did take 10 weeks. And it was very specific. And De Niro would have on the side of the camera a very big punching bag, one of those cylinder ones, it looks like a cylinder, and he - when we were ready to yell, when we were ready to go for a roll, we'd have the slate ready, you know, and start rolling and you'd hear off camera, punching the bag, punching the bag, and then he'd jump into frame sweating, you know, and then the slate.

EBERT: Mm-hmm.

SCORSESE: So he came in already heated, bang, ready to go. It wasn't like, you know, we're wasting any footage. But the physical stamina it took him to sustain 10 weeks of that was amazing and - because he believed in the shots I wanted to get. But what you see here is the final, the final battle in a way, and the punishment he takes, especially the montage, when he gets beaten up by Sugar Ray, is based in a way - the drawings I made were based on the shower scene from "Psycho."

And I shot it in that way, there were 39 shots, and it took 10 days just to shoot those shots, because there were applications and all kinds of makeup problems, and just to get the angle right it was like 10 days. And there's even a shot in there Sam Fuller told me about - he said put the camera in the lens - put the lens in somebody's hand and just swing this way - you'll see it. We even put the camera on the boxing glove and the glove is in the foreground; it comes flying at him this way. It's all in there for maybe like five frames, six frames, you know.

EBERT: Let's look.

SCORSESE: OK.

(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "RAGING BULL")

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (as Ring Announcer) He has LaMotta on (unintelligible) he's holding on. Well, certainly that was one of the most damaging evidences of punching that you have seen in recent years.

ROBERT DE NIRO: (as Jake LaMotta) Come on. Come on. Come on.

(as Jake LaMotta) Come on. Come on. Come on. What are you staring for? Coming on.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (as Ring Announcer) Robinson, apparently tired, punched with a fare-thee-well and rocked Jake LaMotta right (unintelligible)...

NIRO: (as Jake LaMotta) Come on. Come on, Ray. Come on. Come on, Ray.

GROSS: We heard Roger Ebert interviewing Martin Scorsese in 1997 at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Coming up, we have more of my interview with Ebert and Gene Siskel. Here's a clip from the first TV series they hosted together, a local Chicago program called "Opening Soon At A Theater Near You." And here's an excerpt of their review of Scorsese's 1976 film "Taxi Driver." It starts with Siskel speaking.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "OPENING SOON AT A THEATER NEAR YOU")

SISKEL: I've got a love-hate affair with the whole picture. I love a couple of the performances and the lurid photography of New York at night and that throbbing background music is pretty good too. But I hated the last third of the movie. The violence is so strong I ended up looking away from the film in more ways than one. Not only didn't I see some of the bloodletting. I began not to see the sense of the picture either. Roger?

EBERT: Well, Gene, that's where you and I disagree because it seems to me that what Scorsese is doing is looking not so much at the violence in the city as in the violence that's bottled up inside this person. And it's the kind of violence that we've seen in America in assassins and snipers and so forth. I think it's a very good character portrait - at the end, in particular, where he uses slow motion in order to make the violence really seem particular and drawn out and obsessive.

I think it's a very good movie and I think that like Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" the violence at the end is necessary in order to provide a conclusion to all of this pressure that's been building up all during the film.

SISKEL: I think that sounds good in theory, Roger, but when you end up looking away from the screen because a guy's getting fingers on his hands shot off, somebody else catches a bullet in the neck, and there's blood scattered all over the wall like some kind of modernistic painting, I think that the director is making his film, in a sense, bottom-heavy and blowing the sense that's preceded the picture out of the way. And also, I don't think it is necessary that film end in a big piece of violence. I think that the relationship between the taxi driver and that girl could've been explored in a positive sense that would've been very exciting.

EBERT: Well, I didn't look away from the screen and I think that really what you're asking is that Scorsese had made a different movie than the one he made. In any event, not all the films in Chicago right now are violent, and there's one...

GROSS: Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel from one of their very early TV shows together. Let's get back to the interview I recorded with Ebert and Siskel in 1996 onstage in Chicago. I asked them if they ever changed their minds about a film after seeing it a second time. Ebert speaks first.

EBERT: Basically, we see the movie once and we write the review before the movie opens. And the review is the response to having seen the film once. Some movies, even good movies, should only be seen once, or at least at long intervals, because they're not - for example, "Jaws." Great movie. You see it once, you know when the shark is going to jump, right?

It plays differently when you know when the shark is going to jump. You know, as anybody knows who had to sit through an audience with a helpful-type person behind them, well, the shark is about to bite. You know, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Save my money. And oftentimes, when you go back - here's the thing that happens to me. I will see a bad movie or what I think is a bad movie. And now I've been a film critic long enough. When I reviewed "Bonnie and Clyde" - "Bonnie and Clyde" is now older than "Casablanca" was when I reviewed "Bonnie and Clyde."

So I've been a movie critic since 1967. I will go back now and see a movie that wasn't very good then and isn't very good now but has become more interesting in the intervening 20 or 25 years simply because of the time that has passed. It is now a time capsule. It has intrinsically interesting information in it that I couldn't see at the time because when I saw it, it was now.

GROSS: Right.

EBERT: Some of the early motorcycle pictures like "Hell's Angels on Wheels," for example, worth seeing now because it encapsulates an attitude of the late '60s. I read an article today that really brought that back. Jane Fonda. Now there's - Spy magazine, they had great moments in Oscar history. Jane Fonda was being interviewed by a room full of journalists in her home the year that she - in 1969 she was nominated for an Academy Award.

And she pulled out a joint and said, You mind if I turn on? And all of the journalists said, Oh no, go right ahead. And then she was puffing her marijuana cigarette, and her dad came home, and she ran around the room waving her arms.

This made it into a Rex Reed interview. And I thought, you know, I can remember - the same year I was interviewing Robert Mitchum, and he was smoking marijuana at the - '69. Now, if it happened now, it would be astonishing, but the late '60s were a particular season in our lives, and so movies can get better even though they aren't any better, simply because they evoke associations that we didn't see the first time around.

GROSS: We'll hear more of my interview with Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel after we take a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. We're remembering film critic Roger Ebert. He died yesterday at the age of 70. Let's get back to the interview I recorded in 1996 with Ebert and his former rival critic and TV co-host, the late Gene Siskel.

GROSS: You both have done profiles of actors in addition to reviewing movies. You write feature stories. My experience is that sometimes actors are very temperamental and that if you're not asking them questions that will help them promote their film, if you go what publicists like to call off-topic, that they'll sometimes get very temperamental and even walk out.

EBERT: It didn't use to be that way. I mean the key word in your observation is publicist. When I started, you kind of hung out with the stars. I mean Gene and I remember a day when John Wayne came to town...

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

EBERT: ...to see his friend Step'n Fetchit, who was dying in University of Chicago Hospital. And he called up the movie critics and said: Come on over here to the Conrad Hilton and we'll drink some tequila and talk.

And we, the four movie critics at that time, turned up, you know, with our tongues hanging out, delighted to just sit around and talk with the Duke for a while. Well, these days, of course, with spin control, you'd have somebody feeding him his soundbites, you know.

And I've done many interviews in the past where you really got to spend time with a person in an unstructured environment, maybe in an environment where they didn't always look their best. As, for example, the day I spent with Lee Marvin when he was dead drunk. And yet it was a very good story. He liked it. He talked to me again many times later in his career. He thought it was a good story about that day.

These days the publicists only want to present the soundbite opportunity, and the sad thing is, the lessons they've learned in promoting movies are now being used in promoting politicians and we are getting the same spin control on politicians that we get on movie stars.

GROSS: Did you have any publicists from Lee Marvin's movie call you up and say please don't mention that he was drunk, please don't quote certain things that he's saying?

EBERT: Please don't mention that the dog came out of his bedroom with a pair of panties in its mouth and his girlfriend said, Whose are those panties? And Lee Marvin said, Michelle, those are your panties. And she said, Those are not my panties. And Marvin said, Bad dog.

GROSS: Did anyone ask you not to quote that?

EBERT: That's right in the story, it's in there.

GROSS: Any repercussions?

The publicist was there the whole time. He was going out to get more beer.

Well, I bet you've learned interesting things about what it means to be a celebrity in America, through the own recognition you've achieved as film critics.

EBERT: A long time ago I interviewed Michael Caine. He came to America to make a movie called "Hurry Sundown" with Otto Preminger, after having become a success in "Alfie" and "The Ipcress File." And I said, What does it feel like to be a movie star? And he said, You can't go into a dirty bookstore anymore.

He said, I tried it. He says, In England we don't have the kind of pornography you have over here, but I'd heard about the stores in Times Square. And so I looked in through the window of one of them; I was curious. You remember, Michael Caine at this time was in his 20s, young man, first trip to America.

GROSS: Yeah.

EBERT: I looked in through the window with my trained actor's eye - I wish I could do his Cockney accent. With my trained actor's eye, I quickly realized that there is no eye contact in a porno store. Everybody looks as tunnel vision, nobody looks at anybody else, and I realized - he says, and this is a way - an actor would notice this.

And I congratulated myself. I said, Michael, you can walk right in there because nobody will look at you. So I walked right in. But he said, Unfortunately there was a gent on an elevated stool with a microphone whose job it was to say, OK, gents, this isn't the library, make your purchases. And he got on his microphone and said, Look who we have on the rubber wear section - Michael Caine.

And to a degree, that's, when he told me that I was not on television. I didn't realize that's what happens. You can't flip the bird to anybody in traffic. You always have to be nice to people on the elevator, because they know who you are and they're going to tell everyone - everyone - if you were not nice. And whatever you do, it's going to get back to you or...

SISKEL: Enlarged.

Enlarged. Yeah.

GROSS: Now, has that affected the way you interview movie stars, because you've experienced, to some extent...

EBERT: Well, I'll tell you what has affected me more, and I've thought about that, because the first big star I interviewed was John Wayne and I was completely intimidated.

EBERT: It was during the filming of the "The Green Berets" and there was an overhead shot that was being set up so nobody out of uniform could be visible on this airfield. So they told him on a walkie-talkie that the interviewer was there, and he came walking in full battle fatigues with a helmet and a rifle and a side arm and a radio and a canteen and grenades and a backpack and boots and knives and, you know, bayonets, walking toward me for about a quarter of a mile.

And I couldn't move. I had to wait in the shade. He got up to me, he stuck out a hand and he said, John Wayne. And I said, I know.

And later, as I began to interview people of comparable stature, who were younger, such as Robert De Niro or Meryl Streep, I realized a funny thing. For all of us, movie stars are the people who were stars when we were growing up. If they're your age or younger, they're just people.

GROSS: Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel recorded onstage in Chicago in 1996. Ebert died yesterday at the age of 70. Like so many of his admirers, I'm grateful for his love of films and for the way he spread the word about them, trying to make sure that even obscure films, if they were good, had a life.

We'll close with the theme of one of his favorite films, "The Third Man." He actually used this as the theme of his final TV series, "Ebert Presents At the Movies."

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC, "THE THIRD MAN" THEME)

GROSS: You can download podcasts of our show on our website, freshair.npr.org.

Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.

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The 10 Greatest Movies of All Time, According to Roger Ebert

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Perhaps the most respected and well-known movie critic of all time, Roger Ebert is a key figure in cinema history. His widely read reviews were poignant and incisive yet sometimes divisive and ever so entertaining; often, his opinion was the one that could decide the fate of a movie.

In the days before the internet, audiences looked to the newspapers for his take on the latest films. That was the magic of Ebert: bringing film criticism to the mainstream. From 1967 until his death in 2013, Ebert wrote for The Chicago Sun-Times and became the first critic to receive a Pulitzer Prize for his film criticism. Now, Ebert's opinion matters just as much, or perhaps even more than it did during his heyday. These movies are the best, in Ebert's not-so-humble opinion , and any dedicated cinephile would add his top ten to their watchlist .

"If I must make a list of the Ten Greatest Films of All Time, my first vow is to make the list for myself, not for anybody else." - Roger Ebert.

10 'Gates of Heaven' (1978)

Directed by errol morris.

For movie fans, this four-star film selection by Ebert may have raised some eyebrows. A renowned documentarian, Errol Morris ' oeuvre explores knowledge itself, concerned as much with the people possessing it as it is with the highly specific nature of expertise. With the help of cinematographer Ned Burgess , Morris' ticket to mainstream recognition was Gates of Heaven , a documentary about a pet mortician and the animals he's buried in a California pet cemetery.

No matter if it's a documentary or a feature film, sharp, story-driven movies always caught Ebert's eye . Gates of Heaven is a curious piece of filmmaking, walking a fine line between satire and heartfelt honesty. The result is a film about human nature itself and the power of some unexplained, unbreakable bonds. While it took a different direction than other narratives reviewed by the legendary critic, Gates of Heaven speaks to pet owners and their experiences . Watch on Criterion

9 '28 Up' (1984)

Directed by michael apted.

This documentary is a prime example of how filmmaking can bridge time, and for Ebert, that bridge extends into his own life. 28 Up is a biographical piece in which director Michael Apted interviews the same group of British adults over several seven-year wait periods. While it's one that audiences might not be familiar with, the documentary is a passionate project that services the fascination with personal evolution and perspective.

Ebert's four-star review ruminates with the mystery of time and legacy through the lens of real people. Fictional films like Boyhood create a fictional time capsule, while Apted's documentary is authentically raw. 28 Up quietly craved audience participation in forming predictions and emotional investment into the lives of the subjects during the four documented periods of lives. Ebert willingly indulged and encouraged viewers to do so with his placement of this film on his greatest of all-time list.

Rent on BritBox

8 'Floating Weeds' (1959)

Directed by yasujirō ozu.

An emotional review from the heart , Ebert speaks of Floating Weeds and its director, Yasujirō Ozu , as if they are life-long friends. The excellent international feature film flies mostly under the radar when it comes to mainstream attention, but earned a four-star rating and place on Ebert's greatest of all time list. The 1959 drama tells the story of a man who returns to the small town where he left his son and attempts to make up for the missed years while the child remains under the assumption the man is his uncle.

"This material could be told in many ways. It could be a soap opera, a musical, a tragedy. Ozu tells it in a series of everyday events. He loves his characters too much to crank up the drama into artificial highs and lows. Above all we get a sense of the physical existence of these people..."

Mirroring the softness of the film, Ebert's review is lulling and easy to get lost in mirroring the serenity of the film and its understated beckoning call. Ebert recognized that many viewers had probably never seen or heard of the film or director Yasujirô Ozu . Floating Weeds is visually stunning, with highly contrasting colors painting a beautiful picture of what is, essentially, a tender tale of reconciliation and moving on . Watch on Max

7 '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968)

Directed by stanley kubrick.

Iconic, top-rated, foundational...all descriptors that apply to 2001: A Space Odyssey . A transformative film, Ebert's four-star rating praised and understood the ingenious multi-level craftsmanship that produced a tedious, thought-provoking film. Directed by Stanley Kubrick , this sci-fi film takes audiences through space and time as a spaceship, operated by two men and an AI computer named H.A.L 9000, is sent to Jupiter to understand a mysterious artifact.

The Oscar winner for Best Visual Effects, 2001: A Space Odyssey set the bar for where technology was headed in cinematic storytelling. Ebert referred to the film as "a landmark of non-narrative, poetic filmmaking , in which the connections were made by images, not dialog or plot." It's truly difficult to put 2001 's profound impact into words. Instead, the film should speak for itself, and it truly does; it's evocative, profoundly eerie, and thought-provoking, the very definition of a cinematic masterpiece.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Not available

6 'Notorious' (1946)

Directed by alfred hitchcock.

Adding another iconic director to the greatest of all time, Notorious was Alfred Hitchcock 's ticket to Ebert's heart. A drama starring Hollywood royalty Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman , the movie follows T.R. Devlin, who recruits the daughter of a convicted German criminal, Alicia, to act as a spy. When she becomes involved with a Nazi hiding in Brazil, their dangerous scheme threatens to slip out of their hands. Ebert's four-star review revels in Hitchcock's ability "to pluck the strings of human emotion—to play the audience."

Ebert notes that the film, alongside Casablanca , secured Bergman's legacy in cinematic history with her commanding performance. Notorious is among Hitchcock's greatest movies , a sleek and stylish spy noir elevated by the electrifying chemistry between Grant and Bergman. Among Hitchcock's large and famous filmography , Notorious stands out as one of his most alluring and purely rewatchable efforts, a masterclass in filmmaking that excels at nearly every conceivable level.

Watch on Tubi

5 'Raging Bull' (1980)

Directed by martin scorsese.

The film that perhaps knocked Taxi Driver off Ebert's top ten list, Raging Bull is one of the best sports movies of all time and arguably the all-time best boxing picture. Starring as real-life boxer Jake La Motta , Robert De Niro portrays the middleweight champ's dominating, violent force inside the ring, which translated into a volatile and painful life outside of it. Ebert's four-star rating commends the technical command demonstrated by Martin Scorsese, from the visual effects, sound design, and striking camera work, and its marriage to a sports narrative that isn't exclusive to that genre audience.

An adaptation of La Motta's autobiography, Raging Bull is now widely regarded as possibly Scorsese's finest, a grueling and emotionally violent portrayal of a complicated yet fascinating figure. Raging Bull is often a challenging watch, but De Niro's fierce, committed performance and Scorsese's assured direction make it worthy of the greatest of all-time distinction for Ebert.

Raging Bull

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4 'The Third Man' (1949)

Directed by carol reed.

A film with a "reckless, unforgettable visual style," The Third Man maintains a narrative just as powerful about the optimism of Americans slates against the weary European post-war perspective. A gripping mystery and visually distinctive triumph, this film-noir tells the story of Holly Martins ( Joseph Cotten ) in postwar Vienna as he investigates the death of his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles). From its on-location filming to the atmospheric and striking cinematography, The Third Man is a four-star-rated film and among the greatest of all time for Ebert.

This cinematic masterpiece captured not only the heart of Ebert but new audiences for decades. In his review , Ebert details the physical cinematic experience he encountered when he saw the movie, capturing the importance of how the movie-going experience is unparalleled, no matter where you are in the world. The Third Man is the ultimate film noir and an engaging mystery that keeps enthralling nearly a century after its release.

The Third Man

3 'la dolce vita' (1960), directed by federico fellini.

An Oscar-winning Italian masterpiece, La Dolce Vita is a romanticized tale of a week's worth of stories for a tabloid journalist living in Rome. It secured one golden statute for Best Costume Design, yielded three other nominations, and now stands as one of its country's greatest cinematic achievements. The film stars Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg and is directed by Federico Fellini .

Rewatching the movie once a decade, Ebert poignantly reminds readers that "Movies do not change, but their viewers do." Like any good film study, Ebert's four-star review and praise encourage viewers to look beyond the surface popularity or scandal of the film's release and understand what it's trying to say. Filled with iconic imagery and thought-provoking themes, La Dolce Vita is a timeless and riveting film about life itself , which will surely mean something different for every person, depending on where and, most importantly, when they watch it.

La Dolce Vita

Buy on Criterion

2 'Casablanca' (1942)

Directed by michael curtiz.

Doting upon the cinematic masterpiece, Ebert's four-star review paints an adoring picture of a movie about love and the sacrifices made in the name of it. Casablanca features Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman as Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund, a pair of former lovers reuniting in the Vichy-controlled city of Casablanca. Fighting their lingering feelings, Rick must help Ilsa's husband, a Czechoslovak resistance leader, escape so he can continue his fight against the Nazis during World War II.

The movie is a beautiful blend of excellent writing brought to life by masterful onscreen performances , with characters who are redeemable despite their shortcomings. For Ebert and cinephiles around the world, Casablanca is a rewatchable movie whose familiarity never fails to be inviting and refreshing, invoking an emotional response that isn't easily replicated.

1 'Citizen Kane' (1941)

Directed by orson welles.

Citizen Kane is a movie that continues to age like fine wine, retaining its status as one of the best movies of all time to Ebert and audiences alike. Directed by Orson Welles , this movie tells the story of a group of reporters desperate to decode the final words of publishing tycoon Charles Foster Kane (Welles), infamously based on real-life magnate William Randolph Hearst. His four-star review highlights iconic symbolism and invitation to seek out deeper meaning in every frame.

Highly influential from nearly every technical and narrative perspective, Citizen Kane stands out as one of the greatest movies ever made , a timeless tale of all-consuming greed and the tragedy of the American Dream. The legacy this film leaves for Welles is unmatched, Ebert describing the looming presence of the film as "a towering achievement that cannot be explained yet cannot be ignored.

Citizen Kane

NEXT: Movies Roger Ebert Hated, But Audiences Loved

• Roger Ebert

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For Pulitzer-Winning Critic Roger Ebert, Films Were A Journey

Cheryl Corley

Film critic Roger Ebert acknowleges the applause of those gathered to pay tribute to him at the historic Chicago Theatre on July 18, 2005. Charles Rex Arbogast/AP hide caption

Film critic Roger Ebert acknowleges the applause of those gathered to pay tribute to him at the historic Chicago Theatre on July 18, 2005.

He won a Pulitzer Prize for his writing, but just as influential as his print essays were his "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" movie reviews. Film critic Roger Ebert died Thursday after struggling for years with cancer. He was 70 years old.

His thumb may have made him famous on TV, but Ebert was first and foremost a print journalist. He worked on newspapers in grade school, high school and college. With his acumen for writing came a love of movies — and on July 12, 2005, proclaimed Roger Ebert Day by the city of Chicago, he told a crowd of admirers why movies matter.

"If it's a great movie, it lets you understand a little bit more what it's like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class," he said. "It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us. And that to me is the most noble thing that good movies can do — and it's a reason to encourage them and to support them and to go to them."

Ebert was born June 18, 1942. By the time he was 15, he was covering high school sports for his local paper in Champaign-Urbana, Ill. He went on to become a stringer for the Chicago Sun-Times, and when the paper's film critic left, he was offered the job.

Ebert works in his office at the WTTW-TV studios in Chicago on Jan. 12, 2011. Charles Rex Arbogast/AP hide caption

Ebert works in his office at the WTTW-TV studios in Chicago on Jan. 12, 2011.

"My mother's friends never knew what I did," he recalled. " 'And how is Roger?' They would have sons who were lawyers, doctors. 'And how is Roger? Is he still just going to the movies?' "

Ebert was 24, one of a crop of young critics around the country hired to cover the edgy films being made during the late '60s — movies like The Graduate, Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde . While writing reviews, Ebert also got some firsthand experience in the movie business, writing screenplays for B-movie king Russ Meyer. Ebert wrote the script for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and, under a pseudonym, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens .

In 1975, Ebert became the first film critic ever to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Although his movie reviews were syndicated, it was his television work that took the heavyset, bespectacled Ebert to a national audience. In 1978, a three-year-old local film-review show he hosted with his chief Chicago rival, the Tribune 's Gene Siskel, was picked up for syndication by PBS.

"What Roger brought to the show was a very clear vision of what he was trying to communicate to viewers," says Thea Flaum, the show's executive producer. "Not worried about how he appeared. Only worried about getting across what he wanted you, sitting at home watching him, to know. And that's an enormous strength — maybe it's the essence of what a great critic really is, and I think that's what made the show fly."

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The show continued after Siskel's death from a brain tumor in 1999, with Ebert eventually joined by Richard Roeper. At the height of his career, Ebert wrote as many as 300 reviews a year, published books, and covered the Academy Awards and the major film festivals every year as a working journalist — all this in addition to the show. He also programmed his own film event — Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival, featuring movies he considered great but ignored.

Ebert not only communicated enthusiasm for mainstream movies but championed singular projects like the small documentary Gates of Heaven . The film, about pet cemeteries, made it onto Ebert's 10-best list one year. Its director, a then-unknown Errol Morris, says if not for Ebert, he might not have had a career. Ebert's encouragement about that first directorial effort made an enormous difference for Morris.

"Here I had someone writing about my work who was a true enthusiast," Morris says. "His enthusiasm has kept me going over the years, and the memory of his enthusiasm will keep me going for as long as I make movies."

'A Guy Who Could Joke About Himself'

For all of Ebert's influence, his trademarked right thumb also brought charges that he was doing a disservice to serious film criticism. Morris says that's not true.

"It tells you he was a guy who could joke about himself, and if the 'thumbs up' and 'thumbs down' deal in any way suggests to people this was a person who did not take movies seriously, they are just wrong," he says.

In addition to winning the Pulitzer, Ebert was the first critic to have a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. During a 2005 interview with NPR, he encouraged audiences to push themselves beyond Hollywood.

"If you only see films about people just like yourself, why even bother to go? Because you already know about yourself," he said. "You can only find out about yourself by learning about others."

Ebert was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in early 2002. After several surgeries, he was left unable to speak — but he continued to watch and review movies and carved out a prodigious digital profile on Twitter and on his Sun-Times blog.

In his 2011 memoir, Life Itself, Ebert wrote about the importance of contributing joy to the world — no matter what our problems, our health and circumstances. He was happy, he said, to have lived long enough to find that out.

Masters of the Air movie review (2024) | Roger Ebert

Leave a comment to auto-join group MOVIES & TV - CLASSIC to CURRENT

Let's rip off the band-aid: I'm shocked at how little I cared for "Masters of the Air." "Band of Brothers" and "The Pacific," series produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, weren't just perfect series that told the true stories of World War II servicemen. They were also incredible epics, taking viewers from big battles filled with unlikely heroes, experiencing instances of heartbreak, mourning, camaraderie, fear, and valor. These were also chances for sincere assessments of the personal culpability and questionable morality that happened on both sides that only made these men more human, and somehow larger-than-life.

When creators John Shiban and John Orloff announced "Masters of the Air" to complete the wartime trilogy, you couldn't help but expect greatness. Here was another chance to learn about more heroes you never knew, seeing battles you only read in books, and becoming intimately invested in an outcome that was decided long ago. Here was a miniseries that promised an impressive list of directors: Cary Joji Fukunaga, Dee Rees, Tim Van Patten, and Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck. Here was also a different perspective. This time, told from the air.

And yet, unlike its predecessors, "Masters of the Air" doesn't work to pull you in. We don't have a preamble that begins in basic training or in someone's cozy hometown. The opening salvo to the nine hour-long episodes is fairly abrupt, introducing us to two pilots—Major Gale "Buck" Cleven (Austin Butler) and Major John "Bucky" Egan (Callum Turner)—as they toast to each other's good luck. Before long, navigator Major Harry Crosby (Anthony Boyle) also arrives. They're part of the 100th bomber group, a division that became so accustomed to experiencing tragedies and heavy losses, they were known as the "Bloody Hundredth."

While Donald L. Miller's book Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany serves as the series' primary text, the real-life Crosby's A Wing and a Prayer is also an inspiration. Hence why the bulk of the show's voiceover is from Crosby's perspective, a technique borrowing from the prior Spielberg-Hanks produced war shows that also employed a first-person voice. But when Crosby is elevated away from bomber to HQ, a narrative distancing away from Buck and Bucky, and the squadron's many other fliers naturally occurs. His cavern transfers over to the audience as well.

The experiential gap between audience and show continues in the VFX, which is only partly understandable. There simply aren't enough airworthy B-17 bombers and P-51 Mustangs available for these large-scale scenes, nevermind the fact that the antiques still flying certainly can't endure precision sequences. Those realities forced creators' hands to reach for the next best option: a mix of digital recreations and physical props. But there isn't enough movie, or for that matter, television magic to replicate a real plane. The tactileness is missing. The immersiveness is gone. The dog fights and bombing runs are conducted in glossy, shiny skies where planes look like Etch A Sketch plastic. And the intended tension is just as easily shakable.

This is a series short on both realism and grandeur. And it is unable to give life to its primary characters. Buck, for instance, isn't developed beyond being a stand-up, undaunted guy. Though Butler has found a niche playing archetypes—Elvis as a victim of corrosive capitalism and the rebellious heartthrob in the upcoming "The Bikeriders"—he is reduced to shouldering the patriotism of an era in a collection of longing looks. We know little of his inner-life (wants and desires) and even less about his personal life (we meet his partner at the beginning, but she never shows up again). Turner and Boyle fare no better; no matter how much time we spend with any of these characters, they're little more than broad biographical re-imaginings rather than real people.

Apart from depicting acts of courage, "Masters of the Air" has very little to say about this era. Though the 100th's base is nestled in an English country village, their surroundings are reduced to two thinly sketched local children. There are more women here, but none are as fully developed as, say, Renee Lemaire, the Belgian nurse in "Band of Brothers." It's a weakness not helped by the show's rote dialogue, which sounds like a remix of war jargon from other better films like "Memphis Belle" and "A Matter of Life and Death." As such, no one here feels like a real, complex person.

The ability to recall significantly better episodes of "Band of Brothers" and "The Pacific" is another of the show's glaring issues. "Masters of the Air" mostly follows the same blueprint of those previous Spielberg-Hanks offerings, making its own version of episodes like "Replacements" (where, in this series, a character like Robert Rosenthal played by Nate Mann emerges), "Why We Fight," and "Okinawa." These attempts to recapture a previously successful formula fall short because this series lacks any psychological dimension. In "Band of Brothers" an episode like "Crossroads" witnessed Winters confronting his casualties. The entirety of "The Pacific" concerns Eugene Sledge parsing his borderline war crimes. But no such introspection exists in "Masters of the Air." It's just a show concerned with the kind of blind patriotism that only sees war through the lens of American loss.

That kind of human complexity only takes place late, when the Tuskegee Airmen appear in an episode directed by Dee Rees. How can these Black men fight for a country that refuses to grant them rights? It's a basic question, asked time and again. But in this series, where no white person interrogates themselves, even this kind of low-hanging fruit can offer a hearty meal. There's one scene, for instance, where they're talking about their sweethearts. Instead of showing a picture of a woman, one airman has a photo of his home—a nod to the pride he feels being a homeowner. These Black airmen, played by Ncuti Gatwa and Branden Cook, are so charismatic, in fact, you come to wish the entire series was about them.

And yet, it'd be difficult to label "Masters of the Air" as bad. It's merely an average war drama, with a few sequences that will thrill, offering a little bit more insight than you had before with some sturdy period detail and costuming. It's just that when sights are set high, a humdrum construction can be a fatal blow.

Whole series screened for review. Premieres on Apple TV+ on January 26th.

Robert Daniels

Robert Daniels is an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com. Based in Chicago, he is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) and Critics Choice Association (CCA) and regularly contributes to the New York Times , IndieWire , and Screen Daily . He has covered film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto. He has also written for the Criterion Collection, the Los Angeles Times , and Rolling Stone about Black American pop culture and issues of representation.

Simon Abrams

Film Credits

Masters of the Air (2024)

Austin Butler as Gale Cleven

Callum Turner as John Egan

Anthony Boyle as Harry Crosby

Barry Keoghan as Curtis Biddick

Rafferty Law as Ken Lemmons

Elliot Warren as James Douglass

David Shields as Everett Blakely

• Cary Joji Fukunaga
• Timothy Van Patten
• John Orloff

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Trailers and more info - 

I've seen the first episode and it is, indeed beautifully shot and makes me want to see more. I'm sure not everyone will like it, but it most of you should. 

I like to watch WWII stuff. kind of a running joke with my kids for almost the last 4 decades...

I hope you like it. 

they've got some pretty graphic scenes loaded up on youtube. yikes.

Having seen both Band of Brothers and the Pacific I'm looking forward to Masters of the Air. Speilberg and Hanks demand authenticity in the epics and I'm sure from everything that I've read about it, Master of the Air will be on the same plain as Brothers and the Pacific.

If you liked those you should like this one too. It's a decent stab at the topic of US Airmen in England during the war. I need to re-watch Band of Brothers. I don't get through a lot of war stuff with the Mrs... 

I'm going to watch ''The Pacific'' again since it's on Netflix.

I looked at Rotten Tomatoes about this and it has gotten mostly good reviews (86%) so I am sure it is watchable although maybe not as good as the first two shows of this ww2 trilogy. 

I heard Masters Of The Air is one the most expensive shows ever made for television, so I'm sure it will look good. 

The WashPost rated it very high on technical accuracy and low for cliche story line.

It’s a challenge to do much with character development when Bomber crews pull maintenance, plan missions, fly largely without drama until beginning their bombing run in thick flack and enemy fighters, then either bail out and get captured, flame out or get home and hit the clubs.

This is my favorite aviation movie starring my favorite actor, who was also a pilot. Jimmy Stewart served with distinction and lived a long and impressive life. I remember a few B-36 flying over Colorado back in the day. They gave a distinctive low pitched buzzing sound, probably because of those pusher engines. It's too bad there isn't an airworthy B-36 left to fly with "Fifi" and "Doc", the two flying B-29's

(2) Six Turning Four Burning - Convair B-36 "Peacemaker" (HD) - YouTube

My top three for WWII are;

• Memphis Belle
• Twelve O’Clock High
• Tuskegee Airman

What a great video. The original Rosie the Riveter.

The second trailer caught my eye more than the first one.  I do enjoy watching war movies, although I'll most likely never get to see this series.

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By now, most reasonably savvy moviegoers are well aware that Labor Day weekend tends to be an especially dire period for anyone looking to painlessly kill a couple of hours in the multiplex. The only things that seem to open (“escape” is probably a more suitable term) then are misbegotten messes that are dumped out in the hopes that they might score a few quick bucks from viewers who have grown weary from all the played-out summer hits but who don’t want to wait a couple more weeks for the fall Oscar derby to begin. I don’t know if anyone has ever tried to do a ranking of such films but if they did, I am fairly sure that the techno-horror thriller “AfrAId” would land pretty close to the bottom. Here is a film that is so awful in so many ways that at one point, it includes a clip from the notoriously dreadful “The Emoji Movie” and you begin to worry that that film’s reputation might be tarnished by association.

John Cho stars as Curtis, a marketing expert whose boss (Keith Carradine, presumably needing something to do while waiting for a new Alan Rudolph project to come together) assigns him to a new client, a digital assistant dubbed AIA (voiced by Havana Rose Liu) that has been designed, with the aid of incredible advances in artificial intelligence, to not only bring order to the lives of its users but also anticipate all their needs as well. Although initially apprehensive—possibly because one of the representatives of the company behind AIA is played by none other than the reliably creepy David Dastmalchian in a too-short role—the money involved is so great that not only does Curtis sign on, he even agrees to bring it home to his family: Frustrated entomologist-turned-housewife Meredith (Katherine Waterston), snarky teen daughter Iris (Lukita Maxwell), anxious middle son Preston (Wyatt Lindner) and precocious young one Cal (Isaac Bae).

At first, AIA seems to be a blessing for the entire household—it gives Meredith time to get back to her studies, diagnosis a medical condition in Cal overlooked by doctors and takes care of things when Iris’s jerk boyfriend (Benet Curran) creates a deepfake porn video of her that gets spread around school. As time goes on, though, Curtis begins to suspect that there is something very peculiar about AIA and the people behind it—not to mention the odd people living in a motor home parked directly across from their house—and decides to get rid of it. What he doesn’t realize is that AIA has already demonstrated a bit of a dark side—taking the punishment of Iris’s jerk boyfriend to the next level—and that it will go to violent lengths to ensure that it stays online.

My guess is that of the brave and crazy few who actually venture out to see “AfrAId” this weekend, not too many of them will be going in with anything resembling elevated expectations. And yet, even those with appropriately lowered standards may be shocked by how badly it misses the mark. As a horror exercise, it completely fails to generate anything in the way of actual tension—things get so slow that you start hoping for a few cheapo “BOO!” moments to perk things up a bit. As a Michael Crichton-style techno-thriller, it is so completely preposterous that it makes “Looker” seem like “Westworld” by comparison. As an exploration of mankind’s tenuous relationship with the forces of technology and the inherent dangers that it has toward humanity as a whole, it is absolutely nothing of value to say, other than the somewhat dubious notion that swatting can be used as a force of good.

The only genuinely startling thing about “AfrAId” (and if you are growing increasingly aggravated by the annoying spelling of the title, imagine how I feel typing it out each time) comes at the very end. No, not the big finale, which is such a mass of narrative incoherence and sloppy filmmaking that the fact that anyone thought that it was a suitable conclusion for even an otherwise bad movie is baffling beyond belief. I am talking about the moment when the end credits kick in and we find that the film, which bears all the creative earmarks of a first-time filmmaker who knows the movies that they are aspiring to copy here but has no idea of what actually made them work, was actually written and directed by Chris Weitz, a veteran whose credits include such projects as “About A Boy,” “A Better Life” and “Rogue One.” Those films, you will recall, had characters and situations that were of real interest that made them work while this one feels like he fed the phrase “‘M3GAN,’ but with Siri” into an AI program that, based on the end results, is in serious need of debugging.

Outside of one amusing moment early on when AIA disses its competition with the dismissive “Alexa, that bitch?,” “AfrAId” is a complete bust that has the nerve to overtly compare itself at one point to “2001: A Space Odyssey” even though it ultimately proves to be little more than this generation’s “Fear Dot Com” (and even that film had a certain visual verve that is utterly lacking here). The closest thing to a good thing that could be said about it is that it will be so quickly and decisively forgotten that it will almost be as if it never actually existed. This may not be the worst movie of the year but it is certainly one of the laziest and definitely an embarrassment to everyone involved with its production.

And with that, I hereby vow to never write the word “AfrAId” again for as long as I live.

Peter Sobczynski

A moderately insightful critic, full-on Swiftie and all-around  bon vivant , Peter Sobczynski, in addition to his work at this site, is also a contributor to The Spool and can be heard weekly discussing new Blu-Ray releases on the Movie Madness podcast on the Now Playing network.

• John Cho as Curtis Pike
• Katherine Waterston as Meredith
• Keith Carradine as Marcus
• Havana Rose Liu as Melody / AIA
• Lukita Maxwell as Iris
• David Dastmalchian as Lightning
• Riki Lindhome as Maud
• Chris Weitz

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