10 Times Film Critics Actually Changed Their Mind

Given that Roger Ebert is and probably forever will be the world's most iconic film critic, it's fair that he gets a second entry on this list.

Considering his fascinating history with Vincent Gallo's 2003 experimental drama The Brown Bunny, it's certainly a spot well earned.

Gallo's film premiered at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, where it caught immediate ire from critics and audiences alike for its unconventional style and particularly an unsimulated oral sex scene performed by actress Chloe Sevigny on director-star Gallo.

Upon leaving the Cannes press screening, Ebert told a waiting TV crew that The Brown Bunny was "the worst film in the history of the festival," which ignited a feud between himself and Gallo.

Gallo called Ebert a "fat pig with the physique of a slave trader," to which Ebert replied, "It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of The Brown Bunny."

The squabbling continued, but Ebert re-reviewed the film when a new cut premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival later that year, with almost 30 minutes chopped off the original runtime.

Shockingly, Ebert posted an adulatory three-out-of-four-star review of the new cut, saying:

"Gallo went back into the editing room and cut 26 minutes of his 118-minute film, or almost a fourth of the running time. And in the process he transformed it. The film's form and purpose now emerge from the miasma of the original cut, and are quietly, sadly, effective. It is said that editing is the soul of the cinema; in the case of The Brown Bunny, it is its salvation."

Speaking in 2018, five years after Ebert's death, Gallo was however left unsatisfied by Ebert's turnaround, deeming it "both far-fetched and an outright lie," and proclaiming, "If you didn't like the unfinished film at Cannes, you didn't like the finished film."

Either way, for a critic to change their stance so drastically is nothing if not a testament to the power of editing.