There is nothing quite so bittersweet as seeing time wear down the virility and effectiveness of the people we look up to in our lives. We see our grandparents and then our parents slow with age, and go from towering, irreproachable figures of strength in our lives to, well, human beings. This happens much more quickly in the world of sports, where the top athletes usually have about a decade of dominance before they face the inevitable decline that the physical toll of any professional sport takes on the body. We thrill to the brilliant performances of Mario Lemieux, Michael Jordan, or (gag) Brett Favre, but inevitably we have to see their abilities decline in their last years before they retire from their respective sports, often staying longer than they should and somewhat tainting our memories of their younger brilliance. This isn’t news. Everybody gets old, everybody burns out, everybody fades. But one place we never seem to acknowledge it is in the realm of critics. Movie critics, theater critics, literary critics, and music critics might have more in common with professional athletes than it might seem. Ryan Dixon’s review of Roger Ebert’s autobiography got me thinking about this, and how Roger, who was once such a towering figure and whose opinions greatly influenced my film consumption has become someone whose reviews I have a hard time reading these days. Let’s start with early career. A young athlete will come into their league hungry, bursting with talent, but not yet seasoned through experience. A critic will come in the same way—hungry to establish esteem among readers, or at least to stand out from the pack of film studies or philosophy majors desperately trying to make a living with their degrees. Younger critics are not...

Every hero hears the call to adventure. So, too, then must a critic — perhaps the most passive of all protagonists — discover the stylistic and aesthetic tools needed to tell perfect strangers how to think about a work of art. In Roger Ebert’s new memoir Life Itself, the critical call to adventure occurs after first seeing legendary director Ingmar Bergman’s drama of existential dread, Persona: “I didn’t have a clue how to write about it. I began with a simple description: “At first the screen is black. Then, very slowly, an area of dark grey transforms itself into blinding white. This is light projected onto the screen, the first basic principle of the movies. The light flickers and jumps around, finally resolving itself into a crude cartoon of a fat lady.” And so on. I was discovering a method that would work with impenetrable films: Focus on what you saw and how it affected you. Don’t fake it.” Roger Ebert has never faked it. The passion and clarity with which he writes about movies in his memoir is infectious, reminding us why, as America’s most influential cinematic tastemaker, he is the critic who launched a thousand cinephiles. Ebert’s promotion to film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times at age 25 and his rapid ascent to multi-media cultural mainstay is chronicled in several wonderfully entertaining chapters that form the narrative spine of this book. Along with Bergman, film luminaries Martin Scorsese, Russ Meyer, Robert Altman, Woody Allen, John Wayne, Werner Herzog, Robert Mitchum and Lee Marvin are portrayed with such grin-inducing gusto that it’s a constant temptation to put the book down and just watch their movies. Aside from movies, we quickly discover, Roger Ebert loves a lot of other things too: Full-figured women; 1957...