Life Itself

Life Itself (2014) is an American documentary you can watch online on iFILM. Steve James — director of Hoop Dreams — adapts Roger Ebert's memoir of the same name, filming the legendary Chicago Sun-Times critic through the final months of his life in 2013.

The film moves on two tracks at once. In the present: a hospital room, rehab sessions, the voice that cancer took and the text-to-speech machine that replaced it, and Ebert still watching movies and filing copy. In the past: a 1975 Pulitzer Prize (the first ever given to a film critic), the decades-long on-air partnership with Gene Siskel that audiences loved precisely because both men genuinely annoyed each other, and a late marriage to Chaz Hammel-Smith that outlasted every prognosis. Werner Herzog, Ava DuVernay and Ramin Bahrani appear among those whose careers his reviews helped shape.

James made something harder than a tribute. It is an account of a man who loved movies more than he feared dying — and that specific kind of courage comes through on every frame. Stream Life Itself (2014) online on iFILM.