Roger Joseph Ebert was born on June 18, 1942 in Urbana, Illinois. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - where he was editor of the Daily Illini. He is best known for his film review column in the Chicago Sun Times since 1967 and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert and Siskel and Ebert and The Movies. After Gene Siskel's death in 1999, Roger Ebert teamed up with Ruchard Roeper for the television series Ebert and Roeper and The Movies which began airing in 2000. Ebert's movie reviews are in more than 200 newspapers in the U.S. and worldwide by Universal Press Syndicate. He has written… more than 15 books, including his annual movie yearbook whcih is mostly a collection of his reviews for that year. He became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize. His televisio programs have been nominated for Emmy awards. In June 2005 he was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He was the first professional critic to receive this award. He has honorary degrees from the University of Colorado, the AFI Conservatory, and the School of Art Institute of Chicago. He has written a Great Movies series since 1994 whcih he sees as the most important films of all time.
David Bordwell is Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He holds a master's degree and a doctorate from the University of Iowa. He is the author of The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer (University California Press, 1981), Narration in the Fiction Film (University Wisconsin Press, 1985), Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (British Film Institute/Princeton University Press, 1988), Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Harvard University Press, 1989), The Cinema of Eisenstein (Harvard University Press, 1993), On the History of Film Style (Harvard University Press, 1997) and Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of… Entertainment (Harvard University Press, 2000). He has won a University Distinguished Teaching Award.