Roger Ebert, R.I.P.
It's a sad day for fans of film criticism: Roger Ebert, one of the most influential and famous movie critics of the last four decades, has died of cancer. He was 70 years old.
Ebert reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years, and was the first film reviewer to win a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Here's how the Sun-Times obituary start:
For a film with a daring director, a talented cast, a captivating plot or, ideally, all three, there could be no better advocate than Roger Ebert, who passionately celebrated and promoted excellence in film while deflating the awful, the derivative, or the merely mediocre with an observant eye, a sharp wit and a depth of knowledge that delighted his millions of readers and viewers.
"No good film is too long," he once wrote, a sentiment he felt strongly enough about to have engraved on pens. "No bad movie is short enough."
You can read the rest of the obit here.