Roger Ebert’s Great Movies app is nearly exactly what it sounds like — a collection of the reviews that have been written for Ebert’s series of Great Movies books. But it’s also quite a bit more than what it sounds like. It is not just an alphabetical listing of more than 300 extremely well-written film critiques. It’s also a bridge that takes users from reading about great films to seamlessly getting them to view these films as quickly as possible.
And if you only know Roger Ebert as the guy who sent a regrettable tweet after Jackass star Ryan Dunn perished in a high-speed car accident, than you should study up on the most influential mainstream movie critic of the last half century.
Back to the app.
Sure, you can sort the reviews by title, release date and review date, or simply type in a title to see if it has been reviewed. Even doing that alone would leave you with an extremely thorough app. The reviews are all installed when you download the app, which means you can read them at your leisure whether you have an active Internet or cellular connection going or not.
Roger Ebert’s Great Movies also lets you compile separate lists of the films you’ve seen and those you haven’t. You could spend days just going through this list of movies and checking off whether you’ve happened upon them before. As someone who loves to throw things into lists and give order to chaos, I admit to liking this feature more than it probably warrants.
But what really makes this app great is as simple as a button. A button that lets you add the movies you want to watch from the list into Netflix. You’ll have to sign in once with Netflix to authorize the app to alter your queue, but once you do you can instantly throw in movies as soon as you see their titles. It’s a fantastic way to discover films you missed or even to rediscover ones you had forgotten about.
True cinephiles probably have seen many of the movies in Ebert’s app, but I think it’s worth a look whether or not you’re a movie buff. Roger Ebert’s Great Movies combines a man’s love of film with some smart tech to make sharing that love easier than it has ever been before. From where I sit, that’s worth two thumbs up.
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