The Great Movies II by Roger Ebert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"[Kieślowski] is one of the filmmakers I would turn to consolation if I learned I was dying, or to laugh with on finding I would live after all."

I typed the epigraph with a feeling of deep sadness. Roger Ebert, to me the best film critic ever, died in 2017. I do hope he looked to Kieślowski for solace in his most difficult moments.

Roger Ebert's The Great Movies II is a collection of 100 reviews of movies, which made a very strong impression on the critic. Few months ago I reviewed here the third set and in another few months I will review the original volume. As I explained in my review of The Great Movies III instead of reviewing the reviews, I will quote a few fragments of Ebert's analysis of four films out of the 100, which made the strongest impression on me, plus two "honorable mentions." Very few people can match the outstanding literary quality of Ebert's writings.

Let's begin with one of my most favorite films ever, Coppola's The Conversation, ostensibly a thriller, and a great one, but really a marvelous psychological drama, full of wisdom about human life. Ebert writes:

"The Conversation comes from another time and place than today's thrillers, which are so often simpleminded."

Then, for me, comes Kieślowski's Three Colors Trilogy, where

"Blue is the antitragedy, White is the anticomedy, and Red is the antiromance. All three films hook us with immediate narrative interest. They are metaphysical through example, not theory [...]"

Red is absolutely stunning in its depth of perception of randomness of human life. Blue, beautifully filmed, is painfully sad yet makes it clear that life is worthwhile at least to see films like that. I don't particularly like White, which I find not metaphysical enough and too topical in its plot. Mr. Ebert's review of Trilogy is the best film review I have ever read. Written in wonderful, evocative prose it virtually bursts with wisdom:

"On another timeline, in a parallel universe, the judge and Valentine might have themselves fallen in love. They missed being the same age by only forty years or so."

Now, Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Absolutely unforgettable film, even if based on rather absurd premise and surrealistic plot about people who

"constantly arrive for dinner, and sometimes even sit down for it, but are never able to eat."

I love how Ebert summarizes Bunuel's art:

"[...] the more I look at his films the more wisdom and acceptance I find. He sees that we are hypocrites, admits to being one himself, and believes we were probably made that way."

My fourth choice is Fellini's Amarcord, as Mr. Ebert writes, "a movie made entirely out of nostalgia and joy." A movie built of "memories of memories, transformed by affection and fantasy and much improved in the telling."

My first Honorable Mention goes to Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, a classy horror/thriller, which transcends its genre in the same way as Let the Right One In, a vampire movie made 30 years later transcends the vampire genre. Ebert writes:

"I've been through the film with students a shot at a time, paying close attention to the use of red as a marker in the visual scheme. It is a masterpiece of physical filmmaking, in the way photography evokes mood and the editing underlines it with uncertainty."

And finally, one of the most haunting and enigmatic films, also by Nicolas Roeg, Walkabout, about failure of human communication. Mr. Ebert writes:

"The film is deeply pessimistic. [...] all of us are captives of environment and programming: [...] there is a wide range of experiment and experience that remains forever invisible to us, because it falls in a spectrum we cannot see."

Another great volume of reviews! Four stars.

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