Roger Ebert's 50 Greatest Film Reviews

By James Kirk / May 16, 2013

30. Blow-Up (1966) - Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up opened in America two months before I became a film critic," Ebert wrote, "and colored my first years on the job with its lingering influence. Blow-Up is a movie about a photographer who, when enlarging a series of photographs taken in a park, discovers be may or may not have photographed a murder. Whether there was a murder isn't the point, Ebert wrote. The film is about a character mired in ennui and distaste, who is roused by his photographs into something approaching passion. Having studied the film shot by shot in 1998, Ebert concluded that Blow-Up emerges as a great film, if not the one we thought we were seeing at the time, concluding that Antonioni uses the materials of a suspense thriller without the payoff.

29. Blow Out (1981) -

Director: Brian De Palma

John Travolta is a B-movie sound man out recording owls when a passing car suffers a blowout and crashes into the river. When he later listens to the recordings, he believes he hears a gunshot before the blowout. Could it have been murder? After all, the driver of the car was a potential candidate for president. The plot thickens beautifully, Ebert wrote. De Palma doesn't have just a handful of ideas to spin out to feature length. He has an abundance. And Ebert goes on to compare De Palmas work with that of one of his idols, Alfred Hitchcock. In Blow Out there are such Hitchcock hallmarks as a shower scene several grisly murders in unexpected surroundings, violence in public places, and a chase through Philadelphia on the anniversary of the ringing of the Liberty Bell. This last extended chase sequence reminds us of two Hitchcock strategies: his juxtaposition of patriotic images and espionage, as in North by Northwest and Saboteur, and his desperate chases through uncaring crowds, reminders of Foreign Correspondent and Strangers on a Train. But Blow Out stands by itself, Ebert continues. Best of all, this movie is inhabited by a real cinematic intelligence. The audience isn't condescended to. In sequences like the one in which Travolta reconstructs a film and sound record of the accident, we're challenged and stimulated: we share the excitement of figuring out how things develop and unfold, when so often the movies only need us as passive witnesses.

28. Catwoman (2004) -

Director: Pitof

"Catwoman is a movie about Halle Berry's beauty, sex appeal, figure, eyes, lips and costume design. It gets those right. Everything else is secondary, except for the plot, which is tertiary. What a letdown. The filmmakers have given great thought to photographing Berry, who looks fabulous, and little thought to providing her with a strong character, story, supporting characters or action sequences. To which Ebert adds, The score by Klaus Badelt is particularly annoying.

27. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) -

Director: Arthur Penn

Ebert called the 1967 crime movie a milestone of American cinema, one of the five movies that he described as providing him with an out-of-the-body experience. It is also pitilessly cruel, Ebert wrote, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking, and astonishingly beautiful. If it does not seem that those words should be strung together, perhaps that is because movies do not very often reflect the full range of human life. Bonnie and Clyde startled audiences at the time with its graphic depiction of violence. Ebert elaborates on the fact that that, unlike other movies that depict a murder as a bloodless act, Bonnie and Clyde offered up a violent, bloody and realistic depiction of the act. Real people, with dreams and lives, suffering horribly then dying on screen, the violence on film a reflection of the times. Ebert predicted that years from now, it is quite possible that Bonnie and Clyde will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s, showing with sadness, humor and unforgiving detail what one society had come to. He was right.

29. Blow Out (1981) -    

28. Catwoman (2004) - 

27. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) -    

29. Blow Out (1981) -

28. Catwoman (2004) -

27. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) -