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Fri 27 February 2026 17:15, UK
Being one of the most respected voices in your chosen area of expertise doesn’t obligate anyone to follow the consensus. To that end, Roger Ebert praised a lot of shit movies, and he savaged more than a few inarguable classics, cult favourites, and undeniable masterpieces.
He’s one of the few who never understood why everyone was falling over themselves to praise Hal Ashby’s Harold & Maude, couldn’t comprehend why audiences had taken Dead Poets Society to their hearts, scratched his head at The Usual Suspects, and panned David Lynch’s The Elephant Man.
At the other end of the scale, this is the critic who also supported Will Ferrell’s nauseating Land of the Lost, thought Home Alone 3 was a worthy successor to Macaulay Culkin’s first two comedic capers, and mounted a passionate defence of Speed 2: Cruise Control, a catastrophic flop that remains one of the worst sequels to ever crawl out of the Hollywood production pipeline.
Obviously, his job was to review films as he saw them, and it didn’t matter what anyone else thought. That’s the way it should be, whether it’s Ebert or a first-time critic. In his defence, he was laying eyes upon one of the most controversial releases of its era, one that provoked such outrage and offence that its own director banned it from the United Kingdom, a mandate that would stay in place until their death.
However, a masterpiece is a masterpiece, and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange fits the bill. Not for Ebert, though, who raged against almost every aspect of the dystopian literary adaptation, decrying Malcolm McDowell’s Alex DeLarge and wondering why such a gifted auteur had lowered himself to this level.
“We’ll probably be debating A Clockwork Orange for a long time,” he acknowledged. “A long, weary, and pointless time.” That was true, but he still thought it was overrated. “They’ve really hyped A Clockwork Orange for more than it’s worth, and a lot of people will go if only out of curiosity,” he added. “Too bad.”
He made a point of referring to Alex as a “sadistic rapist” on three separate occasions, underlining his contempt, which informed the entirety of the review. “Directors sometimes get sanctimonious and talk about their creations in the third person, as if society had really created Alex,” he proffered. “But this makes their direction into a sort of cinematic automatic writing. No, I think Kubrick is being too modest: Alex is all his.”
Ebert hated the character, hated the plot, and even hated the lenses that Kubrick used to shoot the picture, while also finding the time to accuse it of “another, perhaps even more unforgivable, artistic sin.” What was the sin? “It is just plain talky and boring,” are descriptors that aren’t used about the nightmarish thriller that often, if at all.
Is A Clockwork Orange a two-star flick? Common sense, and its reputation in cinema history, would say no. Since this was Ebert’s review, and he could rate it however he wanted, he decided that A Clockwork Orange was, in fact, a two-star flick.