Quotes by Film Critics

One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.

All you'll get from strangers is surface pleasantry or indifference. Only someone who loves you will criticize you.

The British are just as keen to make money as the Americans but they prefer hypocrisy to a blatantly commercial attitude.

Wendy Michener

The thought that we are enduring the unendurable is one of the things that keeps us going.

Molly Haskell

In Hollywood if you don't have happiness you send out for it.

Rex Reed

However, James and Aamir did not discuss their astounding box office grosses or formulas for success.Instead, they exchanged notes on the process of film-making; how ideas, even seemingly crazy ones that require developing a unique camera, as James did for Avatar, become a reality; how stories and not special effects are the heartbeat of movies.

Anupama Chopra

I’m pretty sure Mom and Dad didn’t see me coming, either: the kid with the black moods, the kid whose mind was always elsewhere, flinching from real life as from a bruise. Who wanted to lay a fiction-filter on top of everything and pretend it was something else just to keep the sheer disappointment of it all bearable: this limited, empirical experience of ours, trapped inside a decaying shell of meat, mainly able to perceive that nothing lasts, even in our most pleasurable moments.

Gemma Files

In thinking about 'depressing movies,' many people don't realize that all bad movies are depressing, and no good movies are.

Roger Ebert

It’s hard to explain the fun to be found in seeing the right kind of bad movie.

Roger Ebert

Watching movies simply is a promiscuous experience. The voracity it breeds! That quantity of quiddity compressed and quickened and sent at you! It's a little bit mad, isn't it, to hold a faithful flame for the one you've picked, when no such choice is required of you? The sane response to a rainbow is not to pick your favourite colour.

Antonia Quirke

Along with Batman v. Superman and Godzilla vs. Kong, I suppose we’ll get Frankenstein vs. Dracula, and perhaps Transformers vs. G.I. Joe in the HasbroVerse, and Warcraft vs. Angry Birds in the GameVerse — not to be confused with the BoardgameVerse of Battleship vs. Risk and Chutes and Ladders vs. Candy Land.And eventually all of these shared universes will collide with all of the others, including Alien vs. Predator and Freddy vs. Jason, in a Brobdingnagian rumble pitting Jedi against Pirates of the Caribbean, Terminators against Borg, and Muppets against Smurfs, world without end. Even if for some inexplicable reason that doesn’t happen, the LegoVerse will make it happen

Steven D. Greydanus

The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.

Pauline Kael

All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it.

Roger Ebert

There is a point when a personal opinion shades off into an error of fact.

Gene Siskel

Far from being a pack of baying butchers,critics sometimes have a perverse habit of tending to the sick and wounded on the cinematic field of battle, rushing in where angels fear to tread, even when the patient is clearly without a pulse.

Mark Kermode

Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest.

Jean Douchet

The longing for improvement and the fear of waste and worse - it is a pattern still with us, and maybe it speaks to the medium's essential marriage of light and dark, or as Mary Pickford put it in her autobiography (published in 1955), Sunshine and Shadow. Light and dark were the elements of film, and they had their chemistry in film's emulsion. They had a moral meaning, too. But not everyone appreciated that prospect, or credited how it might make your fortune.

David Thomson

The sad thing is that when movies like this fail, executives think that proves there's no audience for unusual, original pictures - because they think they've made one.

Roger Ebert

No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out.

Roger Ebert

You think you know it, but you always find out new stuff.

Gene Siskel

...When the bespangled Miss Charisse wraps her phenomenal legs around [Fred] Astaire, she can be forgiven everything—even the fact that she reads her lines as if she learned them phonetically.

Pauline Kael

Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.

Pauline Kael

It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.

Roger Ebert

So much of what happens by chance forms what becomes your life.

Roger Ebert

Take your hands off my sentences, asshole. I sweat blood for that shit.

Scott Adlerberg

As time passes, the cast and crew go the way of all flesh, though their celluloid echoes remain--walking, talking, fighting, fucking. After enough time, every person you see onscreen will have died, transformed through the magic of cinema into a collection of visible memories: light on a screen, pixels on a videotape, information on a DVD. We bring them back every time we start a movie, and they live again, reflected in our eyes. It's a cruel sort of immortality, I guess, though it probably beats the alternative.

Gemma Files

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

Roger Ebert

You can't say it wasn't interesting.

Roger Ebert

...most ghosts are a rag and a bone and a hank of hair at best--a memory fragment stuck on continual loop, just dust and PKE and water-vapour with no real "there" there. Leftover fragments of psychic energy deluded into believing in their own personality; an echo cobbled together from memory and pain, with no self-awareness as such 'cept what we give them. Survival instinct, with no survival.

Gemma Files

If more people had the courage to discover their potential, we might find that such talents are not so rare

Jeffrey Overstreet

One, don’t wait for inspiration, just start the damned thing. Two, once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it’s going?

Roger Ebert

On Hayao MiyazakiI told Miyazaki I love the "gratuitous motion" in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are."We have a word for that in Japanese," he said, "It's called ma. Emptiness. It's there intentionally."Is that like the "pillow words" that separate phrases in Japanese poetry? "I don't think it's like the "pillow word." He clapped his hands three or four times. "The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness, but if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb.

Roger Ebert

Cookbooks, it should be stressed, do not belong in the kitchen at all. We keep them there for the sake of appearances; occasionally, we smear their pages together with vibrant green glazes or crimson compotes, in order to delude ourselves, and any passing browsers, that we are practicing cooks; but in all honesty, a cookbook is something you read in the living room, or in the bathroom, or in bed.

Anthony Lane

I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, "If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation." . . . Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Roger Ebert

A depressing number of people seem to process everything literally. They are to wit as a blind man is to a forest, able to find every tree, but each one coming as a surprise.

Roger Ebert

Anti-intellectualism is virtually our civic religion. "Critical thinking" may be a ubiquitous educational slogan—a vaguely defined skill we hope our children pick up on the way to adulthood—but the rewards for not using your intelligence are immediate and abundant.

A.O. Scott