As a child of the seventies and one that has never liked blowing hard-earned money and two hours of my life on an awful movie, I was always a big fan of Siskel & Ebert’s show, At the Movies. Siskel passed on in 1999 and has since been replaced with Richard Roeper, but the two Windy City newspaper critics introduced a format of back-and-forth dual reviews that were always greater than the sum of their individual reviews in the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times.

What made it great? Well, Gene and Roger were great critics, first and foremost. But they also had great chemistry, probing each other on their thoughts on films they loved and loathed, and challenging each other in a dynamic conversation about each films merits and failures. Of course, plenty of times they agreed, giving movies two thumbs up or two thumbs down. But sometimes the most fascinating exchanges were those where they disagreed–the friendly spats were a delight to watch.

The digital era brought an algorithmic expansion of the wisdom-of-crowds (wisdom-of-the-pair?) concept, with Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic rendering a score based on the number of reviewers giving a movie a positive or negative review. But there’s still that missing dynamic exchange that we enjoyed on TV. The closest thing I’ve seen has been Bloggingheads.tv’s diavlog, but these tend to be generally discussion-oriented, as opposed to two bloggers reviewing the same movie like Siskel and Ebert did.

With Dyalogues we plan on changing that. Stay tuned.

Note: For almost a year now, the entire corpus of Siskel & Ebert, and Ebert & Roeper, reviews have been available online. Enjoy! (Here’s their review of my favorite movie; two thumbs up!)