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. He was 70. 
 
 His death was announced by The Chicago Sun-Times, where he had worked for more than 40 years. No cause was specified, but he had suffered from cancer and related health problems since 2002. 
 
 It would not be a stretch to say that Mr. Ebert was the best-known film reviewer of his generation, and one of the most trusted. The force and grace of his opinions propelled film criticism into the mainstream of American culture. Not only did he advise moviegoers about what to see, but also how to think about what they saw. 
 
 President Obama reacted to Mr. Ebert’s death with a statement that said, in part: “For a generation of Americans — especially Chicagoans — Roger was the movies. 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.” 
 
 Mr. Ebert’s struggle with cancer gave him an altogether different public image — as someone who refused to surrender to illness. 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. 
 
 “When I am writing, my problems become invisible, and I am the same person I always was,” he told Esquire magazine in 2010. “All is well. I am as I should be.” 
 
 In recent years, Mr. Ebert became a prolific presence on Facebook and Twitter, on which he had more than 800,000 followers, and was a blogger as well. 
 
 He fired tweets with machine-gun rapidity, on topics both profound and prosaic. 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. “Pixar is the first studio that is a movie star,” went one tweet. 
 
 He swore he would not become addicted to Twitter, but emphatically did. But Mr. Ebert — whose handle was @ebertchicago — never tweeted during a movie. 
 
 Mr. Ebert liked to say his approach — dryly witty, occasionally sarcastic, sometimes quirky in his opinions — reflected the working newspaper reporter he had been, not a formal student of film. His tastes ran from the classics to boldly independent cinema to cartoons, and his put-downs could be withering. 
 
 “I will one day be thin, but Vincent Gallo will always be the director of ‘The Brown Bunny,’ ” he wrote. 
 
 His thumbs-up-or-down approach drew scorn from some critics, who said it trivialized film criticism. Speaking to Playboy magazine in 1991, Mr. Ebert agreed that his television program at the time was “not a high-level, in-depth film-criticism show.” But he argued that it demonstrated to younger viewers that one can bring standards of judgment to movies, that “it’s O.K. to have an opinion.” 
 
 In 1975 he became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, for his Sun-Times reviews. His columns were syndicated to more than 200 newspapers in the United States and abroad, and he wrote more than 15 books, many by skillfully recycling his columns. In 2005 he became the first film critic to be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. 
 
 “In the century or so that there has been such a thing as film criticism, no other critic has ever occupied the space held by Roger Ebert,” Mick LaSalle, movie critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, wrote in 2010. “Others as influential as Ebert have not been as esteemed. Others as esteemed as Ebert have not had the same direct and widespread influence. And no one, but no one, has enjoyed the same fame.” 
 
 With Mr. Siskel, Mr. Ebert popularized television film criticism. Their collaboration began in 1975. Mr. Ebert was asked to appear on WTTW, the public broadcasting station in Chicago, as co-host of a new movie-review program. He was intrigued, but then taken aback when told that Mr. Siskel, the film critic of The Chicago Tribune, would be his partner. 
 
 “The answer was at the tip of my tongue: no,” Mr. Ebert told Time magazine in 1987. 
 
 As for Mr. Siskel, he said he initially had no desire to team up with “the most hated guy in my life.” ||||| I will always regret that I had only one direct exchange with Roger Ebert, and it took place via email. In that brief but (for me) significant correspondence, he proved as kind and gracious a soul as you would expect. Personally, I wish I’d behaved better. 
 
 It was on March 6, 2006, the morning after “Crash” won the Oscar for best picture — an upset in every sense for those of us who were rooting for the presumptive favorite, “Brokeback Mountain.” The resulting online uproar was so intense that it spurred Ebert to write a vigorous defense of Paul Haggis’ film, decrying “the fury of the ‘Crash’-lash” and accusing the hardcore “Brokeback” fans of acting in bad faith. More or less proving him right, I lashed out. I fired off a crankily defensive email, lambasting someone I had read and respected for ages but never met, and whom I would have addressed on any other occasion with nothing less than stammering politeness. 
 
 See Also: Roger Ebert Dies at 70 Photos 
 
 To my surprise, Ebert saw fit not only to publish my letter in his Movie Answer Man column, but also to write me a personal reply, in which he thanked me for getting in touch, conceded some of my points while gently reasserting his own, and told me he respected my work. Shamed but not silenced, I sent back a bloated apology, which occasioned another polite response and an altogether friendlier, more harmonious back-and-forth. I may have started us off on the wrong foot, but Roger redeemed our encounter with his characteristic good nature and genuine delight in engaging with his readers — the very qualities that made him, for so many of us, an ideal companion at the movies. 
 
 My takeaway lesson was that an act of grace, especially one coming from an elder and a superior, will always prevail over a difference of opinion. And it was the consummate grace of Ebert’s voice — that inimitable blend of wit, erudition, amiability and common sense — that made him our most important and indispensable film critic, someone you loved to read no matter how violently you disagreed with him. Like all great thinkers and writers, he rendered irrelevant the small-minded tyranny of right and wrong answers through his vivid, literate and unpretentious command of language. His thumbs may have changed the face of criticism, but it is Ebert’s writing for which he will be most fondly and significantly remembered. 
 
 We all have our favorites — in my case, derived from hours spent not watching the various TV shows he made famous with Gene Siskel (although I did that, too), but poring over the review archives on the Chicago Sun-Times’ website. I remember watching “Dead Poets Society” in high school and feeling pretty much alone in despising it; I found a kindred spirit in Ebert, who memorably tore the film to shreds: “I was so moved, I wanted to throw up.” A few years later he nailed the beauty and heartache of “The Sweet Hereafter,” noting that Atom Egoyan’s intricate, time-shuffling film had been constructed “in the simplest possible way. It isn’t about the beginning and end of the plot, but about the beginning and end of the emotions.” 
 
 See Also: Hollywood Reacts to Ebert’s Death on Twitter 
 
 Ebert always looked for emotion. He could eviscerate a movie with the best of them, but in many ways his work offered precisely the opposite of the cruel cynicism that is assumed to be the critic’s stock-in-trade. In more recent years, he seemed to err increasingly on the side of charity, adopting a sometimes mystifyingly liberal hand with four-star reviews — a generosity that nonetheless went hand-in-hand with his essentially optimistic view of the medium. 
 
 Stories of his support for younger critics are legion, but even as he was fostering aspiring talent, he never stopped showing us how it was done. Too often, when we talk about art, we do so in tones of overly hushed, self-serious reverence, placing it on a forbidding pedestal. As someone who can lapse into all manner of contorted academic language to explain why readers should care about Hou Hsiao-hsien or Nuri Bilge Ceylan, I envy the exquisite simplicity with which Ebert can nail a film like Bela Tarr’s “Werckmeister Harmonies”: “If you have not walked out after 20 or 30 minutes, you will thereafter not be able to move from your seat.” Without ever once deviating from a conversational tone, Ebert could make watching Welles, Bresson, Ozu and Mizoguchi sound like nothing less than the purest joy. 
 
 VIDEO: Roger Ebert Through the Years 
 
 In the hands of someone with an unprecedented command of our collective moviegoing minds, this is no small thing. I wanted to applaud when he made the bold decision to include a recent release, “The Tree of Life,” on his list of the 10 greatest films of all time for the decennial Sight & Sound poll. A critic of his age and stature may well have waited to see if Terrence Malick’s film stood the test of time, but Ebert was nothing if not a forward thinker. Before many of us knew Twitter from Facebook, he had already adapted his work to suit the demands of an online following that grew only more massive as time went on. 
 
 It is impossible to quantify the influence that Roger Ebert has had on anyone who cares even remotely about movies and movie criticism. But why limit it to such a narrow range of interest? Inside or outside the often insular, self-protective ranks of film critics, I can think of no writer who has commanded as wide a readership, or been more deeply invested in fostering a dialogue with that readership — a dialogue that overflowed freely into matters of art, science, religion, morality and politics. There was nothing Ebert couldn’t write about, just as there was seemingly no medium through which his work could not be transmitted. 
 
 It is one of the saddest ironies of Ebert’s long, courageous battle with cancer that he was robbed of one of the very things that defined him most: his voice. I speak, gratefully, of his voice in the physical sense, for his real voice never left us and never will. Tirelessly reviewing, blogging and tweeting until the bitter end, he came perhaps as close as anyone can claim to having triumphed over the physical onset of death and its cruelest deprivations. For anyone who ever longed to say something of value about the movies and the world they reflect, he is no less an inspiration in death than he was in life. ||||| Editorial: We were all better for knowing Roger Ebert 
 
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 Do you love what you do? 
 
 Do you go to work every day and try to master your job and feel deeply that it matters? Do you believe that you can, through sheer excellence, make it matter even more? 
 
 Roger Ebert did. 
 
 He loved everything he ever did, and made it matter to all of us, perhaps because he chose wisely. 
 
 Roger loved the movies and big ideas and great conversation and hard work. He loved the very idea of living a full and examined life, and he was an inspiration to millions of others. Movie fans adored Roger, of course, but so did all of us who at times can feel that electric surge that is life itself. 
 
 Speaking of the vitality of youth, Dylan Thomas once wrote — and Roger would appreciate the literary allusion — “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives my green age.” That was Roger, a life force, and it did not fade as his green age grew grey. 
 
 Roger grew up in Urbana, a pudgy only child, a questioning Catholic boy, in the thrall even then of movies and journalism and ideas, and blessed even then with a stunning work ethic. As a kid in high school, he would work all night covering sports for the local paper, then hit the bars — underage — with those glamorous local reporters he couldn’t get enough of. 
 
 Roger moved on to the big city, Chicago, and could never get enough of that, either. He cranked out the smartest stories for the Sun-Times, always delivered in deceptively simple Midwestern prose. Then he’d schmooze into the wee hours with the likes of Nelson Algren and Mike Royko at Riccardo’s and the Billy Goat and, best of all, O’Rourke’s. 
 
 But when the drinking got the best of him, Roger quit cold. He wanted to do so much more of everything else — he knew he had it in him — and the drinking got in the way. 
 
 Roger was unafraid to try his hand. There was his great TV movie review show, “Sneak Previews,” with his unlikely friend and competitor, Gene Siskel. There was an awful screenplay. And a better novel. And an excellent blog that should have won him his second Pulitzer Prize. 
 
 And we who were lucky to work with him, we who felt such intense pride in being Chicago Sun-Times journalists simply because Roger was one of us, we were all better for his example and friendship. 
 
 Roger grew wiser with age. A bit less prideful. A good deal more forgiving. You could see it in his film reviews which, frankly, turned more thumbs up over time. Roger did not agree this was so — he was as tough as ever, he would insist. But he also once wrote, late in life, that while it is easy to find fault in a film or in any work of art, our obligation to each other is to see and appreciate that which is great. 
 
 That was our Roger. To his dying day, he could grow as excited as a little boy at a carnival when he discovered something of true excellence. And then he would tell everybody — he just had to. 
 
 In so doing, Roger Ebert achieved a rare greatness of his own.
– Following Roger Ebert's passing, voices across the country are remembering his landmark contribution to film criticism—as well as his companionship. At Variety, Justin Chang reflects on Ebert's "characteristic good nature and genuine delight in engaging with his readers—the very qualities that made him, for so many of us, an ideal companion at the movies." He goes on to salute "the consummate grace of Ebert’s voice—that inimitable blend of wit, erudition, amiability, and common sense—that made him our most important and indispensable film critic." The New York Times calls Ebert likely "the best-known film reviewer of his generation, and one of the most trusted ... The force and grace of his opinions propelled film criticism into the mainstream of American culture," writes Douglas Martin. "Not only did he advise moviegoers about what to see, but also how to think about what they saw." The Chicago Sun-Times, his longtime stomping grounds, praises his "stunning work ethic," noting that "we who felt such intense pride in being Chicago Sun-Times journalists simply because Roger was one of us ... were all better for his example and friendship." His wife offers a poignant statement, per NPR, on "my husband, my friend, my confidante, and oh-so-brilliant partner of over 20 years." Their romance, Chaz Ebert says, was "more beautiful and epic than a movie." Though he was "happy," she notes, "he was also getting tired of his fight with cancer, and said if this takes him, he has lived a great and full life."