“Pixar is the first studio that is a movie star,” went one tweet. He commented on pro football, his captions for The New Yorker cartoon contest, an old pub he once frequented, James Joyce short stories and untold numbers of movies and television shows, to which he linked. He fired tweets with machine-gun rapidity, on topics both profound and prosaic. Ebert became a prolific presence on Facebook and Twitter, on which he had more than 800,000 followers, and was a blogger as well.

“When I am writing, my problems become invisible, and I am the same person I always was,” he told Esquire magazine in 2010. Though he had operations for cancer of the thyroid, salivary glands and chin, lost his ability to eat, drink and speak (a prosthesis partly obscured the loss of much of his jaw, and he was fed through a tube for years) and became a gaunter version of his once-portly self, he continued to write reviews and commentary and published a cookbook on meals that could be made with a rice cooker. Ebert’s struggle with cancer gave him an altogether different public image - as someone who refused to surrender to illness. When he didn’t like a film, he was honest when he did, he was effusive - capturing the unique power of the movies to take us somewhere magical.” Ebert’s death with a statement that said, in part: “For a generation of Americans - especially Chicagoans - Roger was the movies. Not only did he advise moviegoers about what to see, but also how to think about what they saw. The force and grace of his opinions propelled film criticism into the mainstream of American culture. Ebert was the best-known film reviewer of his generation, and one of the most trusted. It would not be a stretch to say that Mr. No cause was specified, but he had suffered from cancer and related health problems since 2002. His death was announced by The Chicago Sun-Times, where he had worked for more than 40 years. Roger Ebert, the popular film critic and television co-host who along with his fellow reviewer and sometime sparring partner Gene Siskel could lift or sink the fortunes of a movie with their trademark thumbs up or thumbs down, died on Thursday in Chicago.

The Great Movies by Roger Ebert