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Critic Roger Ebert: More 'Great Movies'

Steve Martin and John Candy in <i>Planes, Trains and Automobiles</i>
Steve Martin and John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Movie critic Roger Ebert began his career in 1967 and has reviewed most new releases since then. But to him, that left a lot of films yet to be written about. He released The Great Movies, a collection of 100 movie essays, in 2002; and this year he picked 100 more titles in Great Movies II. He talks about those selections with Scott Simon.

Among them are John Ford's The Searchers (1956), which "contains scenes of magnificence, and one of John Wayne's best performances," Ebert writes. He also includes the John Hughes comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) and Federico Fellini's Amarcord (1974). "The title [of Amarcord] means 'I remember' in the dialect of Rimini," Ebert writes of the film, "the seaside town of [Fellini's] youth, but these are memories of memories, transformed by affection and fantasy and much improved in the telling."

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Scott Simon is one of America's most admired writers and broadcasters. He is the host of Weekend Edition Saturday and is one of the hosts of NPR's morning news podcast Up First. He has reported from all fifty states, five continents, and ten wars, from El Salvador to Sarajevo to Afghanistan and Iraq. His books have chronicled character and characters, in war and peace, sports and art, tragedy and comedy.