Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Most Pixar films are better than most live action films.
Poor decisions and bad luck are contingencies of most horror films.
There's power in turning to the past to illuminate the current state of things.
Anything produced and then exhibited for public view is open to interpretation.
Anytime a movie or television show retreats into certain American pasts, I'm both annoyed and relieved.
I'm a human who is aware of the history of humanity and the ways in which the movies touch on those things.
The relief of 'Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami' is that it seeks to square the person with the provocateuse.
Racism is old, but Peele found a poetic new way of talking about it. He gave us language we didn't know we lacked.
I do feel a responsibility to address things that are problematic, but I don't have to go out of my way to do that.
Sidney Lumet's chief preoccupation wasn't art. It was right and wrong in the American city, nearly always in New York.
When Oliver Stone and Woody Allen came forward to express sympathy for Mr. Weinstein, everybody rolled their eyes at them, too.
My favorite bad thing about 'Three Billboards' is its ambition to play around with America's ideological and geographical toys.
I love to go to the movies with people, but a lot of the time it's me in a room with a bunch of other movie critics, which is fine.
Sometimes a movie knows you're watching it. It knows how to hold and keep you, how, when it's over, to make you want it all over again.
Sidney Poitier became a star in part by helping black and white Americans negotiate their new relationship in the post-Civil Rights era.
Straight white males: that's the predominant moviegoing category, and the persistence of that is a dismaying maintenance of the status quo.
Mr. Clooney has directed six movies; five are set in the middle of the previous century. And 'Suburbicon' clarifies why. Race is a blind spot.
I don't need the audience, but sometimes it's nice to have a gauge - not so I know how I feel, but so I get what is or isn't working for moviegoers.
In 'The One Who Falls,' three women and three men, in everyday clothes, negotiate each other while moving, often in unison, on a giant spinning tile.
All critics have the responsibility to tease out the social ideas and social problems in a movie. I don't feel an obligation to do that because I'm black.
I just have to be able to follow and enjoy the writer's voice and the writer's point of view. Liking what the person has to say is not really important to me.
I definitely have a kind of Stockholm Syndrome for superhero movies because it's very clear that's the era we're in. It's like Christianity in the Middle Ages.
I have a pretty good sense of when to express misgivings. And white critics are just as capable of pointing those things out and noticing them as people of color.
'Bloodlight and Bami' delivers. Ms. Jones shucks her own oysters - stressfully. She does her own make up and performs her own vexed yet amusing contract negotiations.
'In Bruges' featured two hit men on a chatty stroll in Belgium, and certain people's passion for it is fit for Valentine's Day. But it was Tupperware Tarantino to me.
'Suburbicon' feels like a last gasp of some kind of middle. It thinks it's both frivolous and serious. But, for that, you need a touch that George Clooney's never had.
In the Mac vs. PC ads, Apple bills itself as the antidote to Microsoft. To love Apple wasn't to sell out. It was to buy in. Most people use PCs, but Apple has the mindshare.
I like Nora Ephron. She wasn't a critic in the strictest sense of the word, but she did a lot of social criticism. She was so funny and so in the right place at the right time.
My mother very rarely skipped a Thanksgiving turkey. And yet, none of them ever tasted quite the same, landing somewhere on a sliding scale of succulence. She'd try new methods.
Every once in a while with Twitter, you find something that breaks through the bilge and recrimination. Or sometimes, something finds you. One night, 'The Mechanics of History' found me.
I like Rob Morgan in 'Mudbound.' Most of the attention being paid to this movie has focused on Rachel Morrison's cinematography and Mary J. Blige's stiff but intensely stoical performance.
The problem with a lot of movies when it comes to race is that they want to be moral, and they want to make the audience feel good about something that a lot of people don't feel good about.
'The Tree of Life' is a collection of conversations that lost souls and true believers have with themselves while keeping their heads to the sky. But the movie is church via the planetarium.
'Playboy' operated with a patina of civility that granted the average man a presumption of pleasure that went one way - his. And that permission flourished in the psyches of all kinds of men.
'Get Out,' of course, is the surprise hit movie that Peele wrote and directed about a black man named Chris, who discovers that his white girlfriend's family is running a nasty racist conspiracy.
American popular culture has long been marked by an absence of empathy for American Indians. Westerns doubled as a campaign against so-called savages in a way that desensitized us to the savages we'd become.
A movie is just like a work of art or a book or a piece of music. The intent of its maker is one thing, but its interpretation by an audience is something else. I don't stop at what the filmmaker wanted to do.
There is a tragic kind of joke. You really can't keep a man down - good but often otherwise - because history's mechanics are built to keep him climbing toward the top. Somehow, Icarus gets to be reborn as Iron Man.
My father didn't do a lot of direct education. My mother was the direct educator. She would put on these movies on American Movie Classics when we got cable, after my parents got divorced, which took like four or five years.
I don't like turkey. I mean, I do. But I don't like it on Thanksgiving. I don't need it. There are about 20 other dishes that get put on a table or a counter or that stay warming on the stove that I'd rather eat than turkey.
This country is rich with awful things to say about everybody. There's a slur for you and a slur for me - more than one. And because we're terrified of dealing with them head on, we've made them just as easy to warp and defang.
I feel like I've always approached criticism with a degree of morality, right? Like, not as a moralizer, but just as somebody who wants to make sure that the culture we're getting is at least morally aware of how it's functioning.
The reason to do any barking - well, the reason for me - is that 'Three Billboards' feels so off about so many things. It's one of those movies that really do think they're saying something profound about human nature and injustice.
Nudity has never seemed to bother Grace Jones. Her art has thrived, in part, on a physical candor that both shocked people and redrew the boundaries of taste, beauty, and eroticism around her masculinity, ebony skin, and unrelenting intensity.
Movies and television have a way of using a soundtrack not just to create a mood but to literalize it. You could always count on a master class in splitting the difference between artistry and obviousness during the so-called Blaxploitation era.
Robert Pattinson has the face of a film-noir dupe. It's a face that is searching and open and kind. It's a face that a certain type of woman might want to fool because, in its intensely old-fashioned kindness, the face says, I love you. Fool me.
In movies, there are some things the French do that Americans are increasingly incapable of doing. One is honoring the complexities of youth. It's a quiet, difficult undertaking, requiring subtlety in a filmmaker and perception and patience from us.
One result of moviemaking - and a side effect of moviegoing - is familiarity. If an actor is particularly good, familiarity opens into something deeper: care, concern, identification, empathy. Yet even those concepts can feel inadequate for some actors.
Spare a thought for 'Suburbicon' as it swiftly vanishes from America's megaplexes. This is George Clooney's movie about - well, I'm not sure. It's supposed to be the sort of movie that doesn't get made much anymore: starry, not that expensive, 'middlebrow.'
When a black person is acting up or showing off, somebody might say she's 'wilin' out.' In sports, an athlete who really takes it to another level has entered 'beast mode,' which happens to be the nickname of the former Seattle Seahawks superstar Marshawn Lynch.