The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new.
Moviemaking is so male-dominated now that they think they’re being pro-feminine when they have women punching each other out.
Movies are a combination of art and mass medium, but television is so single in its purpose-selling-that it operates without that painful, poignant mixture of aspiration and effort and compromise.
We may be reaching the end of the era in which individual movies meant something to people. In the new era, movies may just mean a barrage of images.
Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn’t know.
Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
What’s disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
Writers who go to Hollywood still follow the classic pattern: either you get disgusted by ‘them’ and you leave or you want the money and you become them.
Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
All our advertising is propaganda, of course, but it has become so much a part of our life, is so pervasive, that we just don’t know what it is propaganda for.
Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction.
If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn’t have any feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too.
It seems likely that many of the young who don’t wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don’t have the patience to make art.
The words “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies.
The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen.
A book might be written on the injustice of the just.
We read critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that we didn’t fully grasp when we saw the work. The judgments we can usually make for ourselves.
There is, in any art, a tendency to turn one’s own preferences into a monomaniac theory.
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.