It's extremely quotable for one thing. Walken was great. It's a good, dark, dramatic movie based on real events. To each their own.

Dude also gave A Clockwork Orange and Fight Club trash reviews yet highly rated The Phantom Menace lol. Ebert was a good writer but I wouldn’t trust his opinion as far as I can throw a stick

Well there are people who say David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” is something special and that is also a terrible movie no one ever saw even with it coming right behind the unexplainable popularity of the TV show. Some even claim that his worst movie and one of the worst movies of the 80’s “Dune” is some sort of cult classic and it nothing but garbage. In my experience if Siskel and Ebert say a movie is bad then you can take it to the bank. Nick

The Tenant is very popular for a 1976 film and has excellent reviews lol. Same with The Damned.

I’m not sure how those films would end up on any type of “all time” great list since it seems that even the critics and audiences who like those movies are few and far between. The directors of those movies have made great films before and also very bad films before so with these being among their absolute worst work according to Ebert it isn’t far fetched to assume he may actually be correct and the people who think those movies are anything great are incorrect. I never saw worse reviews from any movies ever made by these film makers so it wouldn’t make sense that Ebert was the one who suddenly dropped the ball with his review of these films. Nick

All 3(The Damned, The Tenant, 1900) are in the top 600 films of all-time rated by all critics now. I have seen them and they are all marvelous. Ebert missed by a mile.

When you see nearly 150 movies a year as I did during the mid to the end of the 90’s and they are all good you have to figure he/they knew what they were talking about because I saw all of those films based on their reviews. I still see countless movies every year but the 1997 block of films padded by the end of ‘96 and the beginning of ‘98 that I saw were the best movie going experiences of my life and it never came close to being duplicated again. I have never heard of a single movie you keep mentioning to begin with so they can’t be all that great especially if they got negative reviews from them. Nick

I don’t really have a very high opinion I have to say of Ebert. He hasn’t helped me that much. I already provided you with two good examples. The Tenant and The Damned. 1900 is another one. All of these are now regarded as masterpieces by those who have seen them.

I seemed to agree with him over 95% of the time and the way film criticism has gone downhill since his and Gene Siskel’s death is proof they knew cinema and what they were talking about. They were wrong about maybe 1% of all the movies they ever reviewed and between the two of them you could never miss a good movie and constantly avoid the bad ones. Nick