Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.
The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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.
Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
Where there is a will, there is a way. If there is a chance in a million that you can do something, anything, to keep what you want from ending, do it. Pry the door open or, if need be, wedge your foot in that door and keep it open.
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.
The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
What is getting older if it isn't learning more ways that you're vulnerable?
a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it's that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.
Movies that are consciously life-affirming are to be consciously avoided.
Trash has given us an appetite for art.
Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
An artist must either give up art or develop.
The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again.
It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack.
I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider.
Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
When a picture can't make it on its own, the producers pull in a 'controversial' message - the way a couple whose marriage is falling apart decide to have a baby.
It is a depressing fact that Americans tend to confuse morality and art (to the detriment of both) and that, among the educated, morality tends to mean social consciousness.
Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
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