After the sad news of Roger Ebert's recent recurrence of cancer, sadder news follows: Ebert, the much adored and admired film critic whose thoughtful opinions graced the Chicago Sun-Times's pages since 1967, has succumbed to cancer. He was seventy years old.

Ebert had battled thyroid cancer since 2002. In 2006, the loquacious and opinionated Ebert who so treasured the English language was suddenly stripped of it due to post-surgery complications.

His indefatigable spirit, however, could not be suppressed, and despite the cancer that silently continued to grow within him, he kept on pursuing his life's love: critiquing and deconstructing American cinema.

Ebert is well-known for his television show, co-hosted alongside Gene Siskel, in which a movie's fate would hang in the balance as the hosts would encapsulate its quality with a concluding "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" rating. His simple manor and straight-forward reviews always felt like he had the viewer's best interests in mind; never the producers, never the directors, and never the fat-cats of the bloated business that is Hollywood. No, Ebert's reviews cut to the core of what it felt like to experience a movie, and even if you didn't agree with his reviews, you could appreciate his artful interpretations.

In 2011, perhaps sensing his fading hours, Roger Ebert wrote Life Itself, a touching memoir that lays himself bare; warts, worries, and all. His memoir, like his reviews, is an honest reflection of a humble man, ivory towers be damned. The rights to Life Itself have been optioned by Steve Zaillian and Martin Scorsese, brilliant minds -- and ones highly respected by Ebert himself -- to turn his memoir into a forthcoming bio-documentary.

News sources have been linking to Roger's announcement yesterday about his "leave of presence" from the reviewer's desk. The heavy traffic to the webpage has caused it to go down multiple times since the Chicago Sun-Times first reported his death, proving just how many of us still hang on every word he's written. In his note, he wrote: "I must slow down now, which is why I'm taking what I like to call 'a leave of presence.' What in the world is a leave of presence? It means I am not going away." And it's true. While his body has passed on, his body of work remains, a tribute and testimony to his IMAX-sized contributions to our culture and human experience.