Name the film being described in this Roger Ebert review: “The movie is not about ghosts but about madness and the energies it sets loose in an isolated situation primed to magnify them. There is no way, within the film, to be sure with any confidence exactly what happens, or precisely how, or really why. [Director Stanley] Kubrick delivers this uncertainty in a film where the actors themselves vibrate with unease.”
If you answered The Shining, then you might have what it takes to win Roger Ebert’s Movie Trivia! In this 200-card game, Ebert’s film criticism serves as a launchpad for movie trivia—you don’t need an encyclopedic knowledge of his writing to win, just a passion for cinema.
Each card features a quote from one of Ebert’s reviews, including context clues such as actors, directors, and plot details, as well as offering a microcosm of Ebert’s insights and distinctive style. Two questions follow: The first question, the easier of the two, asks you to identify the film based on the quote. The second question is harder, testing players’ general knowledge of the film at hand. Even though this question is meant to be more difficult, a variety of question types—such as multiple choice and true or false—keeps the game fun for everyone while offering a challenge for cinephiles.
Through gameplay, players will encounter great (and not so great) movies, and in the process, rediscover Roger Ebert’s writing—its soulfulness, wit, and above all, an abiding love for film.
Author
Roger Ebert
ROGER EBERT was born in Urbana, Illinois, and attended local schools and the University of Illinois, where he was editor of The Daily Illini. After graduate study in English at the universities of Illinois, Cape Town, and Chicago, he became a film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times in 1967 and won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975. The same year, he began a long association with Gene Siskel on the TV program Siskel and Ebert. After Siskel’s death in 1999, the program continued with Richard Roeper as Ebert and Roeper, a show that is syndicated in more than two hundred markets. Ebert was a lecturer on film in the University of Chicago’s Fine Arts Program, an adjunct professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Illinois, and received honorary doctorates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the American Film Institute, and the University of Colorado, where he conducted an annual shot-by-shot analysis of a film for thirty-five years at the Conference on World Affairs. In 1999 he started an Overlooked Film Festival at the University of Illinois, selecting films, genres, and formats he believed deserve more attention. He is the author of The Great Movies, the bestselling annual volume Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook, and Roger Ebert’s Book of Film, in addition to a dozen other books. He died in 2013.
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