Taking its cue from its subject’s memoirs, the life and career of the late Pulitzer prize-winning US film critic Roger Ebert is celebrated in this supremely elegant and infectiously warm picture from seasoned documentarian Steve James (Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters). Charting Ebert’s pioneering career, friends and colleagues fondly recount how this whirlwind of a man possessed with ease both the word and the bottle. His popularising of the movies through his work as a pundit alongside fellow Chicagoan Gene Siskel, which splashed the pair’s now famed thumbs up/thumbs down verdicts across the televisions and billboards of America, are the most vivid testaments to his unswerving ability to have his finger on the critical pulse of film culture.

Heartfelt tributes from some of the filmmakers he banged the drum for down the years, including James himself, underline the influence his opinion could have on the lifespan of a movie. In later life, even when cancer took away his jaw and his voice, he enthusiastically reinvented himself as a blogger, self publishing on the internet where through his writing he found communion with a global audience numbering in the high hundreds of thousands.

A man who Werner Herzog once hailed as ‘a soldier of cinema’, Life Itself is a fitting testimony to someone who both shaped and transcended the movies. Two thumbs up.

Ticket prices: Screenings before 16:00: £5.50 full / £4.00 concessions. Screenings after 16:00: £8.00 full / £6.50 concessions.

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