Roger Ebert Broke Down What Every Movie Review Should Do in 84 Seconds

We haven't really had a tastemaking critic since Roger Ebert left this astral plane. It's hard to explain what a grip his thumbs had on the 90s and early 2000s. Basically, if he loved a movie, chances are it would do well.

Now, we look at sites like Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates most film critics, but I always recommend people seek out someone they love reading and who they think aligns with their taste.

Anyway, if you want to be a critic or find a critic that you love, there are some criteria you should be looking for, which Roger Ebert laid out.

In this short clip from Interview Archives Learning Objects, he explains the three things that, if you write about film or want to, you should probably remember.

Let's get into it.

Play Fair With Your Reader

The first thing Ebert says a review has to do is give the reader "some notion of what the movie is about and what it is like."

That sounds simple, right? Except look at what passes for film criticism online right now. You can read 900 words about a movie and come away with no actual sense of what it felt like to sit in that theater. Just vibes and hot takes.

Every movie is the best ever, or it's the worst ever.

Your readers deserve nuance, even on your Letterboxd reviews.

Ebert says you should be able to give a movie a bad review, genuinely hate it the way he hated North , and the reader should still be able to finish that piece and decide, "You know what, that actually sounds like something I'd enjoy."

You don't get to make that choice for them.

Your job is to convey the experience, not just deliver a verdict.

He calls that version of a great review, giving the movie "its day in court."

First-Person Tone

People are reading your reviews in order to hear what you think. That may be obvious, but you'll see how many people online just skip over that.

Ebert points out that of the average readers of any newspaper, probably less than one or two percent will ever go see the movie you're reviewing.

You're missing the point of what these reviews are supposed to do.

The vast majority of the people reading you are never going to buy a ticket. They're reading because they want to spend time with someone who has something interesting to say about the world.

And they want to know how that movie brought the world out of them.

That's why first-person matters. Not because it's stylish or because Pauline Kael did it. But because you are the product that's brought people cak to reading your words.

So, write it in the first person point of view.

Make It Entertaining to Read

This is the hardest one. It's also the one most critics completely ignore. And the one I beg you never to forget.

Ebert says anyone who buys the paper should be able to open to the movie review and "enjoy themselves whether or not they're going to go to the movie."

And if he were around today, he'd feel the same about people reading your blogs or Substack.

That's a seriously high bar. Your review has to be worth reading on its own terms.

This is where a lot of online film writing falls apart. The whole architecture of ranking systems and aggregators has trained critics to treat the text as the footnote to the score.

The writing is just the justification for whether or not you go to the movies. And like a lot of Ebert's reviews, it should be the stuff you can share with your friends back and forth to help you summarize your feelings after you see the movie, too.

Summing It All Up

I'm not trying to be the guy who yells "nobody writes like they used to!" because plenty of people are doing incredible film criticism right now.

I love Justin Chang, Amy Nicholson, David Ehrlich, Manohla Dargis, and Matt Zoller Seitz, among many others. ************************

This doesn't mean I agree with them in every movie, but it means they write in a way that tells me if I think I'll like it, and they can entice me to see things I maybe didn't even know were on my radar.

They do reporting with a point of view that somebody can enjoy with a cup of coffee while they figure out if they're going to go to the movie later that day.

What do you think makes a great review? Let me know in the comments