The Westboro Baptist church (WBC) plans to picket Roger Ebert's funeral on Monday after the Pulitzer prize-winning film critic tweeted a link to an article criticising the anti-gay organisation before his death.

Ebert died last week aged 70 after a decade-long battle with cancer. Last month, he tweeted a salon.com article by writer Jeff Chu, who spent a day at the Westboro Baptist church while researching his book Does Jesus Really Love Me?: a Gay Christian's Pilgrimage in Search of God in America. "One more day at the Westboro Baptist church," posted Ebert.

A statement on the WBC website (pdf) rounded on Ebert, pledging to maintain a presence outside the Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago and saying: "American entertainment industry publicity leech Roger Ebert took to Twitterverse to mock the faithful servants of God at Westboro Baptist church, just days before he received the horrifying summons."

The WBC, which is also anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic and anti-Chinese, believes that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are God's punishment on America for tolerating homosexuality. The group has demonstrated at military funerals across the US, regardless of the sexual preferences of the deceased.

Ebert's final review – on To the Wonder, the new Terrence Malick film – was published on Saturday in the Chicago Sun-Times, where he had been a film critic since 1967.

It was accompanied by a note from Ebert's editor saying: "The following is the last review written by Roger Ebert. Appropriately it's a review of a film by a director Mr Ebert held in great esteem: Terrence Malick."

To the Wonder stars Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Rachel McAdams and Javier Bardem. Ebert, who gave the film 3.5 stars out of four, was in contemplative mood as he mulled the drama's opaque and "elusive" nature.

"A more conventional film would have assigned a plot to these characters and made their motivations more clear," he wrote. "Malick, who is surely one of the most romantic and spiritual of film-makers, appears almost naked here before his audience, a man not able to conceal the depth of his vision.

"'Well,' I asked myself, 'why not?' Why must a film explain everything? Why must every motivation be spelled out? Aren't many films fundamentally the same film, with only the specifics changed? Aren't many of them telling the same story? Seeking perfection, we see what our dreams and hopes might look like. We realise they come as a gift through no power of our own, and if we lose them, isn't that almost worse than never having had them in the first place?

"There will be many who find To the Wonder elusive and too effervescent. They'll be dissatisfied by a film that would rather evoke than supply. I understand that, and I think Terrence Malick does, too. But here he has attempted to reach more deeply than that: to reach beneath the surface, and find the soul in need."

There will be a separate memorial service for Ebert on Thursday at an unrevealed location.