Time & Perspective Quote by Roger Ebert

Ebert’s line is a stealth rebuke to the idea that criticism is just consumer guidance: thumbs up, thumbs down, next. A “great film,” in his view, isn’t a puzzle you solve once and shelve. It’s a machine for producing fresh meaning - not because the movie changes, but because you do. The sentence puts the burden on the artwork to keep pace with a living viewer, and it also flatters the audience with a challenge: if it isn’t “new,” maybe you’re watching on autopilot.

The phrasing is deceptively simple. “Should seem” admits the trick at the center of cinema: the images are fixed, the experience is not. Ebert isn’t demanding novelty in plot; he’s talking about a film’s capacity for re-encounter - the way a cut, a pause, a glance accrues different weight after you’ve loved someone, lost someone, aged, or learned the rules of filmmaking well enough to notice when a director breaks them. Greatness becomes rewatchability with consequences, not comfort.

Context matters: Ebert built a career arguing that popular art could be serious without being solemn, and that movies are an empathy technology. This quote draws a clean line between disposable entertainment (which you “finish”) and cinema that stays porous - open to interpretation, mood, politics, and memory. It’s also a quiet defense of the critic’s job: if the best films remain new, then returning to them, writing again, seeing again, isn’t redundancy. It’s the point.