These days, Siskel and Ebert are best remembered for the thumbs up/thumbs down rating system they created (not least of all because they trademarked the phrase “two thumbs up” in 1986). But as Singer shows, their true legacy was pioneering a new kind of film criticism, staging accessible debates around aesthetic judgment, asserting unapologetically that art can and should matter to everyone. Together, Siskel and Ebert shaped a film culture in which people not only saw the same movies as their friends and neighbors but wanted to discuss what they had seen.
A certain generation of film writers, critics, and educators learned how to have these kinds of conversations from Siskel and Ebert, as well as from lightly cinephilic publications like Premiere Magazine (now defunct) and Entertainment Weekly (now online-only), which managed to produce loving, penetrating criticism under the auspices of corporate media. As Singer writes of the 1990s, “While the audience for ‘serious film criticism’ was still present, a far broader segment of the population was reading and watching movie talk more than ever.” So, it wasn’t just me—the movies really did matter more when I was a kid.
But the 1990s were a long time ago, or so I’m told. And today, as the profession of film criticism withers under the dual pressures of layoffs at magazines and newspapers and the rise of AI-generated authorship, the question has become: Is looking back at what Siskel and Ebert accomplished just a nostalgia trip, or does their work offer a possible way forward for criticism and perhaps even for moviegoing. Thumbs up? Thumbs down? Open palm, so-so gesture?
OPPOSABLE THUMBS has the arc of a classic Hollywood love story—or, perhaps, a buddy film. Siskel and Ebert began as competitors, working as film critics at the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago-Sun Times, respectively. But, just as much as they were bound to be rivals, they were also fated to be friends. They were, after all, two white, Midwestern men of a certain generation who loved pranks, harbored schoolboy crushes on actresses, and cherished their 1960s and ’70s touchstones like personal talismans.
More importantly, Siskel and Ebert were shaped by and, in turn, helped shape what many consider to be the golden age of film criticism, from the 1960s through the 1970s. Siskel, whose love of cinema was sparked by the 1964 Japanese art film Woman in the Dunes, came to criticism through journalism. He thought of himself as a reporter on “the national dream beat,” Singer writes, and believed that “movies were always about the macro.” In that sense, his approach fit comfortably with the ideology-focused critics and scholars of the 1970s, including Robert Sklar (Movie-Made America) and Molly Haskell (From Reverence to Rape).