Roger Ebert bashed at Toronto Film Festival

Roger Ebert (pictured with his wife Chaz), America's best-known film critic, was involved in an unseemly dust-up at the Toronto Film Festival on Thursday. Pulitzer prize-winner Ebert, whose speaking voice was recently lost to the effects of cancer treatment, had popped into a screening and found the New York Post’s film reviewer Lou Lumenick sitting in front of him and blocking his view. Because he can't talk, he tapped Lumenick on the shoulder. Finding the gesture insulting, Lumenick turned around and whacked Ebert hard with a folder.

Only afterwards did Lumenick realise he had hit the revered Chicago Sunday Times film critic. "Lumenick hit him so hard everybody could hear it," reports a source. "Everyone freaked out and turned around."

While Ebert, 66, sought to play down the incident, saying it "has been blown out of proportion [and] is of little interest", his spirited wife, Chaz, in good Chicago style, was less keen to let the matter go. Says Ebert: "Her reaction when she heard was 'I'll get a no-neck guy from the West Side to break his knees'. "