Roger Ebert's Final Movie Review

Kirsten AcunaApr 9, 2013, 17:36 IST

Roger Ebert passed away Thursday at age 70 after a long battle with cancer. Sunday, The Chicago Sun Times published his final film review to his web site. Jim Emerson, who edits Ebert's site, tweeted the review of Terrence Malick's "To the Wonder" from Ebert's account.

"To the Wonder" stars Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Rachel McAdams, and Javier Bardem and follows the relationships of Affleck's character, Neil, in both America and abroad in Europe.

Ebert gave the film three out of four stars, saying the film could just as easily have been silent. Overall, the movie received mixed reviews. "To the Wonder" will open in limited release April 12. Here's an excerpt from his review: A more conventional film would have assigned a plot to these characters and made their motivations more clear. Malick, who is surely one of the most romantic and spiritual of filmmakers, appears almost naked here before his audience, a man not able to conceal the depth of his vision.

"Well," I asked myself, "why not?" Why must a film explain everything? Why must every motivation be spelled out? Aren't many films fundamentally the same film, with only the specifics changed? Aren't many of them telling the same story? Seeking perfection, we see what our dreams and hopes might look like. We realize they come as a gift through no power of our own, and if we lose them, isn't that almost worse than never having had them in the first place?

There will be many who find "To the Wonder" elusive and too effervescent. They'll be dissatisfied by a film that would rather evoke than supply. I understand that, and I think Terrence Malick does, too. But here he has attempted to reach more deeply than that: to reach beneath the surface, and find the soul in need. Last year, Ebert added Malick's "The Tree of Life" to his list of greatest movies of all time. Read the entire review on his blog HERE.

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Roger Ebert's Final Movie Review