Book Review - The Great Movies

The Great Movies by Roger Ebert - The first of a series of books by my all time favorite movie critic.  Before he died he added two more to the series.

Ebert offers relatively brief (couple pages each) commentaries on movies that he thinks belong in the top tier of films.  He admits right off the bat that he can't tell what the standard is for a "great movie".  These are the ones that come to his mind when he thinks about them.  He proceeds to tell you why he believes they belong on the list.

You will recognize plenty of the titles.  Any modest movie lover knows "Casablanca", "Network", "Star Wars", "Pulp Fiction" or "Schindler's List".  Students of the movies will not be surprised to see "Battleship Potemkin", "The Bicycle Thief", "Un Chien Andalue" or "The Seventh Seal" there.  What sucked me in were the odd balls and lesser knowns.  Like "Detour" (which I saw and reviewed after reading about it in the book), the low budget film noir that could be the perfect introduction to this film genre.  It has no pretensions and plenty of flaws.  Yet it remains a truly wonderful movie.  There are plenty of gems among the 100 titles that he explores.

You could easily use this book as the basis for an introduction to film class.  You could still use for upper level course work too.  I was tempted to use it to set up my Netflix queue for the next two years.

If you love the movies and well written commentary(easy to read as well.  Ebert doesn't have to show off), you would be hard pressed to find a better place to start.

Rating - **** Recommended