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Critics reviews

LIFE ITSELF

Steve James United States, 2014
One of the most fascinating aspects of Life Itself is how it becomes a catalogue of Ebert's various speaking voices as well... Unsurprisingly, the story of their often rancorous partnership is the most compelling strand in James's film, though Ebert's less prickly and more generous side is duly praised by his wife Chaz and many of the filmmakers he supported (a group that includes James, whose landmark 1994 doc Hoop Dreams benefited greatly from Ebert's thumb).
November 14, 2014
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A tender docu-memorial for Roger Ebert, a film critic who dealt in wit, passion and insight for the masses.
November 13, 2014
In its structure as well as its content, Life Itself isn't merely the story of a famous film critic, but a testimony to how a voice manifests itself among the people in one's life. In that sense, this movie might speak for all of us.
July 20, 2014
Life Itself stops short of outright deification... but it preaches to the choir so much about the Midwestern critic as a career-maker/saver, a jovial public figure, and a consummately loyal professional that its primary goal remains driving Ebert's historic legacy one last time into the collective consciousness. More damningly, it does all this a package that grows wearyingly conventional around the 30-minute mark.
July 18, 2014
Such candor helps close the gap between author and audience, though it also often leaves [James] with little more to do than collate archival photos and deploy functional—if often entertaining and emotional—talking-head interviews with colleagues, critics, filmmakers, and family members. In attempting to encapsulate a life, the film ultimately becomes a bracing snapshot of death, with the subject working together with the filmmaker to see and be seen during whatever time remains.
July 7, 2014
When critics review films, they bring the sum of their intellectual capacity and life experience to bear, along with whatever drama (or comedy) they're going through at that moment in time. "Life Itself" gets this. Life itself, that loaded two-word phrase, is what Roger really wrote about when he wrote about movies. Life itself is what I'm dealing with as I sit here in a hospital waiting room. And it's what you're dealing with as you sit here reading this review of "Life Itself."
July 3, 2014
The New York Times
Life Itself" is a work of deftness and delicacy, by turns a film about illness and death, about writing, about cinema and, finally, and very movingly a film about love.
July 3, 2014
This isn't one of James's best films, but it's still impressively nuanced and unsentimental. The biographical material never lapses into hagiography; James acknowledges Ebert's personal failings and even gives screen time to other critics who disagreed with his worldview (including Readercontributor Jonathan Rosenbaum). Yet it's the unflinching depiction of Ebert's physical decline that gives the movie its emotional force.
July 2, 2014
A paradoxical and vitally overflowing character emerges: a compassionate moralist with vast appetites, a raucous public performer whose confessional candor had a nearly religious purity. Though acclaimed for his writing, Ebert was famous for his televised collaboration with Gene Siskel; their conflicted and mysterious relationship is central to the film, as it was in his life.
June 30, 2014
Life Itself is often moving (with some of this material there's no way it couldn't be), but it doesn't feel finished. The continual disjunctions between the soft heroic sell and the acknowledgements of professional opportunism keep the film thrumming along, but they also foster an impression that James is rushing and dutifully covering all his bases to evade accusations of creating a puff piece.
June 29, 2014
Ebert's tragic death midway through filming certainly shapes "Life Itself" in a way that was not part of the original conception—there is a particularly heart wrenching interview where Chaz describes her husband's peaceful passing—but James doesn't allow Ebert's death to overshadow his life.
February 25, 2014
Unusually moving (not only to stray film critics in your crowd), director Steve James's keen profile of the late, great Roger Ebert works both as a compact appreciation of the reviewer's vast public impact, as well as an unflinching peak into a cancer patient's final months, fraught with pain, hope and constant treatment.
January 27, 2014