• In terms of health he had no luck. Various forms of cancer had been gnawing away at his body for years and he had lost his jaw to a tumor. But as film critic, Roger Ebert, who passed away yesterday at 70, was an icon for a profession that's often misunderstood, if not ignored. I often recoiled at discovering that a movie had been reduced to a "thumbs up" or a "thumbs down" but what's there not to love about the charismatic Roger Ebert?