Roger Ebert's 50 Greatest Film Reviews
14. A Clockwork Orange (1972) -
Director: Stanley Kubrick
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Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, starring Malcolm McDowell, prompted one of Roger Eberts most scathing reviews, and it hardly seems to do it justice to merely quote from it. Its a review you need to read in its entirety, and it can be found here. While a great admirer of director Stanley Kubrick, Roger Ebert was not kind in his review of A Clockwork Orange, which he called an ideological mess, a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading as an Orwellian warning. It pretends to oppose the police state and forced mind control, but all it really does is celebrate the nastiness of its hero, Alex." Ebert expresses extreme distaste for the films lead character, Alex, because he is played as a hero instead of a wretch, blaming Kubrick and not Anthony Burgess, the author of the book on which the film was based, for the mishandling of the character. I don't know quite how to explain my disgust, he concludes. What in hell is Kubrick up to here? Does he really want us to identify with the antisocial tilt of Alex's psychopathic little life? "Why he likes Beethoven is never explained, but my notion is that Alex likes Beethoven in the same way that Kubrick likes to load his sound track with familiar classical music -- to add a cute, cheap, dead-end dimension. "We'll probably be debating A Clockwork Orange for a long time -- a long, weary and pointless time. The New York critical establishment has guaranteed that for us. They missed the boat on , so maybe they were trying to catch up with Kubrick on this one. Or maybe the news weeklies just needed a good movie cover story for Christmas. "I don't know. But they've really hyped A Clockwork Orange for more than it's worth, and a lot of people will go if only out of curiosity. Too bad. In addition to the things I've mentioned above -- things I really got mad about -- A Clockwork Orange commits another, perhaps even more unforgivable, artistic sin. It is just plain talky and boring. You know there's something wrong with a movie when the last third feels like the last half." 13. Aguirre, Wrath of God (1973) -
Director: Werner Herzog12. Apocalypse Now (1979) -
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
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Based loosely on the novel Heart of Darkness, Francis Ford Coppolas Apocalypse Now is widely considered one of American cinemas finest achievements. Martin Sheen is dispatched by his Army command deep into the jungles of Vietnam in search of an AWOL colonel named Kurtz (Marlon Brando), and what he finds, in Kurtzs words, is the horror of war. In his second review of the film, Ebert writes, Seen again now at a distance of 20 years, Apocalypse Now is more clearly than ever one of the key films of the century. He praised the film for not just its technical perfection, but for its ability to push beyond story and into thematic abstracts that challenge the viewer. "Apocalypse Now is the best Vietnam film, one of the greatest of all films, because it pushes beyond the others, into the dark places of the soul. It is not about war so much as about how war reveals truths we would be happy never to discover.