For the occasion of the 65th birthday of Roger Ebert, Richard Corliss has published a lengthy appreciation of America’s best-known living film critic in TIME. It is a bit of a fawn-job–a birthday gift from an admitted “trusted friend…of three decades”–but there’s a lot of good stuff here. I think there’s one paragraph specifically where Corliss really gets to the heart of what makes Ebert’s criticism interesting:

When he doesn’t like a movie, he will often go out of his way to mention some attractive element amid the carnage, giving what amounts to a review that says, “Yes, but! Big but!” And when he decides that a movie rates a pan