As I said yesterday, the thing that Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert did better than anyone was to evangelize good films with their series At the Movies (which ends this weekend). They helped create audiences for indie and foreign films that were ignored by the Hollywood promotion machine. They even had the guts to rate documentaries like Hoop Dreams and Crumb as their picks for the year’s best film. Without Siskel and Ebert, I would never seen some of the greatest films of the 80s and 90s.
Here are Siskel and Ebert introducing a great indie film, David Mamet’s House of Games.
And a great foreign film (that launched a great film trilogy), Blue.
And the revival of a restored classic film noir, Touch of Evil.