Acclaimed director Steve James (Hoop Dreams) and executive producers Martin Scorsese (The Departed) and Steven Zaillian (Moneyball) present LIFE ITSELF, a documentary film that recounts the inspiring and entertaining life of world-renowned film critic and social commentator Roger Ebert a story that is by turns personal, funny, painful, and transcendent. Based on his bestselling memoir of the same name, LIFE ITSELF, explores the legacy of Roger Ebert's life, from his Pulitzer Prize-winning film criticism at the Chicago Sun-Times to becoming one of the most influential cultural voices in America.
You're going to read a lot of reviews about the Roger Ebert documentary, Life Itself, and most of them will be very personal, more personal than reviews tend to be and for very good reason. To many of us, Roger Ebert was the patron saint of film criticism. He was the inspiration for doing what we do; helping to instill in us a love of movies that was evident every single time he wrote or spoke about cinema. And this was before the age of the Internet, a time when we got our news from *gasp* newspapers or on a handful of television channels. Ebert was a giant, and Life Itself is a giant of a film
Steve James, whose incredible documentary Hoop Dreams was championed by Ebert, took on the project while Ebert was still very much an active presence. It would be some time later during production that Ebert's hard-fought battle with cancer would claim his life, just as it had claimed his power of speech some time back. But James does not make this a story about the man's passing, although we are taken through the heartbreaking ups 'n downs of his final weeks. This is a look back at the life of a man emboldened by an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and an undying gift for communication.
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