The Time Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel Stood Up For Star Wars

Film critics can often be their own worst enemies. Too many critics allow their personal preferences regarding filmmaking elements like genre, style, and tone to bias their assessments of individual films, with their writing coming across as elitist. They sometimes declare their opinions and those of others who formally study film to be more important than those of more casual moviegoers, which in turn can lead people to choose not to read criticism at all. Part of the reason that the famed duo of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel were and are so admired is that they generally didn’t participate in this kind of gatekeeping.