Roger Ebert Movie Review

Weekend Box Office: January 4-6, 2008

National Treasure: Book of Secrets tops the box office with $20.1 million

Daily Box Office: Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Juno tops Wednesday's box office with $1.4 million

"Bucket List" (PG-13, 97 minutes). Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman play geezers who Meet Cute in a hospital room, where they're both given a year to live. Freeman keeps a list of things he means to do before kicking the bucket, and Nicholson, a billionaire, gleefully insists they use his private jet to circle the globe, see the pyramids, the Himalayas, the Taj Mahal, etc. (none of which are on Freeman's list). The premise is absurb, and the excecution is painful. Rating: One star.

Millions (A Lottery Story) / ***1/2 (No rating)

"Millions (A Lottery Story)" (Unrated, 101 minutes). Portraits of six lottery winners: Six high school kitchen workers from Minnesota, and two New Yorkers. Not so much about their luck as about their good hearts and cheerful coping strategies. The director, Paul La Blanc, has the same ear for the American vernacular and eye for detail that Errol Morris exhibits. Funny, warming, eccentric, fascinating. Rating: Three and a half stars.

There will be Blood / ***1/2 (R)

"There Will be Blood" (R, 158 minutes). Daniel Day-Lewis in a virtuoso performance as an obsessed loner, starting with nothing and becoming a California oil tycoon, in a live dominated by greed, duplicity, hatred and loneliness. Paul Thomas Anderson's epic is ambitious and relentless as the study of a human monster. Magnificent visuals created by cinematographer Robert Elswit and set designer Jack Fisk. A debatable ending, and its reach exceeds its grasp, which is not a dishonorable thing. Rating: Three and a half stars.

The Rape of Europa / *** (Not rated)

"The Rape of Europa" (Unclassified, 117 minutes). A startling documentary about the extent of Nazi looting of art treasures during World War Two -- incredibly, totaling a fifth of all Europe's significant artworks. Many of them, stolen from their Jewish owners, have surfaced mysteriously in galleries and museums, leading to efforts to regain them by the rightful owners. Covers Hitler's "shopping lists" and his mad scheme to build the world's greatest museum in his home town. Narrated by Joan Allen. Rating: Three stars.

Great Movie: Diva (2008)

By Roger Ebert Peering into obscure corners of Paris, Jean-Jacques Beineix emerged with an assembly of unlikely, even impossible, characters to populate his "Diva" (1981), a thriller that is more about how it looks than what happens in it. Here is an exhilarating film made for no better purpose than to surprise and fascinate. I remember it at Toronto 1981, where it arrived unknown and unsung and won, as I recall, the festival's first audience award. Now released in a restored print, it glistens in its original magnificence.

Great Movie: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

By Roger Ebert Homer thinks maybe they should stop at his Uncle Butch's saloon for a drink before they get home. "You're home now, kid," the older man Al tells him. Three military veterans have just returned to their hometown of Boone City, somewhere in the Midwest, and each in his own way is dreading his approaching reunion. Al's dialogue brings down the curtain on the apprehensive first act of William Wyler's "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946), the first film to win eight Academy Awards (one honorary) and at the time second only to "Gone With the Wind" at the U.S. box office. Seen more than six decades later, it feels surprisingly modern: lean, direct, honest about issues that Hollywood then studiously avoided. After the war years of patriotism and heroism in the movies, this was a sobering look at the problems veterans faced when they returned home.

Movie Answer Man: Does Juno give away
one-liners like free iPods?

Q: On the strength of your naming "Juno" the best film of the year, I just took it in at my local googleplex, and I was a tad disappointed, even though I largely agree with your review. I was distracted to the point of annoyance at the implausibly hipper-than-thou sentences zipping out of the lips of the movie's characters. Juno is hip. Juno's friends are hip. Juno's parents are hip. Even Rainn Wilson's character, the guy behind the counter at the store, is hip. Only Jason Bateman's and Jennifer Garner's characters seem to be spared this indignity, probably to make some obscure point about the evils of yuppiehood. A wise reviewer once wrote: "I have a problem with movies where everybody talks as if they were reading out of an old novel about a bunch of would-be colorful characters. They usually end up sounding silly." Well, of course that reviewer was you, and the movie was "Raising Arizona." So can you explain why the affected English bothered you in one but not the other? C. Morris, Noblesville, Ind. A. Your local "googleplex"? We discourage that kind of hip coinage around here. Isn't "movie theater" good enough? Although you have caught me in a contradiction, I would argue that the dialogue in "Juno" mostly works because Ellen Page sells the tone so convincingly. She wins us over. Think of Diablo Cody's words in the mouths of Page's contemporaries, and you cringe. Yes, her parents talk that way: Where do you think she learned it? As for the drugstore clerk and Juno's best girlfriend, it's as if she affects the linguistic weather when she enters a room. And here is Felix Vasquez of the Bronx, N.Y.: "This movie has divided audiences around the Internet. Some love its cute and intelligent way of addressing teen pregnancy, while others hate the pop culture quip-dialogue and put Diablo Cody through the wringer for it. Yet they never seem to complain when Tarantino or Kevin Smith use the exact same sense of dialogue."