- 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.
- Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them.
- [from her review of Carnal Knowledge (1971)] . . . A grimly purposeful satire about depersonalization and how we use each other sexually as objects, and, in Mike Nichols' cold, slick style, it is like a neon sign that spells out the soullessness of neon.
- [from her review of High Anxiety (1977)] "High Anxiety" is dedicated to Alfred Hitchcock as "the master of suspense", and it doesn't have a whisper of suspense. It doesn't operate on any level except that of bumbling slapstick farce, where most of the custard pies miss their targets.
- I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
- [on Orson Welles] By the sixties he was encased in make-up and his own fat, like a huge operatic version of W.C. Fields.
- [on Richard Harris] He hauls his surly carcass from movie to movie, being dismembered. I'd just as soon wait 'til he's finished.
- [on Nicolas Roeg] Nothing in Roeg's style appears to be spontaneous; it's all artifice and technique, like an entertainment for bomb victims. Nobody expects any real pleasure from it.
- [on Cary Grant] Everyone thinks of him affectionately because he embodies what seems a happier time. We didn't want depth from him; we asked only that he be handsome and silky and make us laugh.
- [on Charles Grodin] He keeps threatening to be funny but he rarely makes it.
- In the frivolous, absurd old days, stars were photographed in their bubble baths; now they bathe in tears of self-pity.
- [on love] Love knows no honor; people in love do things that they never thought they'd do and that they've always despised other people for doing. They violate not only their scruples but their own style.
- [on Ice Station Zebra (1968)] It's terrible in such a familiar way that at some level it's pleasant. We learn to settle for so little, we moviegoers.
- Nick Nolte is close to the ideal screen actor--believable, and with a much larger range than Steve McQueen or John Wayne.
- [on Ryan's Daughter (1970)] Gush made respectable by millions of dollars tastefully wasted.
- [on Diva (1981)] It's a glittering toy of a movie by a director who understands the pleasures to be had from a picture that doesn't take itself very seriously. Every shot seems designed to delight the audience.
- [on Dangerous Liaisons (1988)] One of the least static costume dramas ever made and what costumes! A first-rate piece of work by a director who's daring and agile. It's heaven--alive in a way that movies rarely are.
- [on Steven Spielberg] He pushes buttons and because people like that button pushing, they think Spielberg is a great director. But he's become, I think, a very bad director. I thought his Peter Pan movie [Hook (1991)] was just awful. It was closed-in and mean-spirited. And several of his recent movies have really depressed me. Always (1989) was a shameful movie. Even his best work in Schindler's List (1993) is very heavy-handed. And I'm a little ashamed for him because I loved his early work. I loved The Sugarland Express (1974). And 1941 (1979) was a wonderful comedy. It didn't make it with the public, but he should have had enough brains to know it was a terrific piece of work and to not be so apologetic about it. Instead, he turned to virtuous movies. And he's become so uninteresting now. I think of the work he did in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and I think that he had it in him to become more of a fluid, far-out director. But, instead, he's become a melodramatist. The first part of Saving Private Ryan (1998) was quite brilliantly effective, but I didn't think it was a good picture. I was disturbed by the later part, which was so much like the old wartime movies--the sentimental variety. I felt as if Spielberg was bucking for awards, to the point where his people seemed outraged when they didn't win them. As if they deserved honors for their serious intentions. His gift is a much lighter one. What you felt in "E.T." was a lightness of soul. It's a wonderful gift, and he's working against it.
- [on The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)] The film wasn't completed in the form that [Orson Welles] originally intended, and there are pictorial effects that seem scaled for a much fuller work, but even in this truncated form it's amazing and memorable.
- [on Eyes Wide Shut (1999)] It was ludicrous from the word go. That orgy was the most hygienic thing I've ever seen. It was strangely decorous. What was that all about, and who were these people that they had the money to stage such things? It really is a creepily bad movie. I don't understand why people were so willing to give [Stanley Kubrick] the benefit of the doubt when a lot of talented directors don't get the benefit of the doubt.
- [on Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969)] Playing the bitch, Dyan Cannon--who looks a bit like Lauren Bacall and a bit like Jeanne Moreau, but the wrong bits--is most effective.
- [on Cabaret (1972)] Joel Grey is every tantalizing, disgusting show-biz creep one has ever seen.
- [on Day for Night (1973)] A movie for the movie-struck, the essentially naive--those who would rather see a movie, any movie (a bad one, a stupid one, or an evanescent, sweet-but-dry little wafer of a movie, like this one), than do anything else. It's for those (one meets them on campuses) who can say 'I love all movies'. It's not for someone like me, who can walk out on A Touch of Class (1973) without a twinge.
- [on her childhood at the movies] All week long we longed for Saturday afternoon and sanctuary--the anonymity and impersonality of sitting in a theatre, just enjoying ourselves, not having to be responsible, not having to be 'good'.
- In the '30s the girls we in the audience loved were delivering wisecracks. They were funny and lovely because they were funny. They could be serious, too. There was a period when Claudette Colbert, Ann Harding Irene Dunne and other actresses were running prisons, campaigning for governor or being doctors and lawyers.
- As I see it, there are the moviemakers who use violence for a turn-on; they put you on the side of the bullies. Examples: The rape scene in A Clockwork Orange (1971). The emotionless killing in the "Dirty Harry" films, such as Magnum Force (1973). The gory opening of Wild at Heart (1990). Then there are the moviemakers who sensitize you to what violence does to its victims. Classic examples: The Grand Illusion (1937), Casualties of War (1989). I think it's the job of a reviewer to make the moral difference clear and to try to make it clear that some movies-such as The Wild Bunch (1969)-blur the distinction. There are also movies that use violence for casual, bang-bang effects; most action films do. They're childish--pre-moral--and a lot of people enjoy that freedom from judgment. What I'm getting at is that violence has a whole range of meanings; simply to condemn it is mindless.
- People have expected less of movies and have been willing to settle for less. Some have even been willing to settle for Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and other pictures that seem to be made for an audience of over-age flower children. These pictures express the belief that if a man cares about anything besides being at home with the kids, he's corrupt. Parenting ennobles Dustin Hoffman and makes him a better person in every way, while in The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) we can see that Alan Alda is a weak, corruptible fellow because he wants to be President of the United States more than he wants to stay at home communing with his daughter about her adolescent miseries. Pictures like these should all end with the fathers and the children sitting at home watching TV together.
- [on Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)] I would like to suggest that the educated audience often uses "art" films in much the same self-indulgent way the mass audience uses the Hollywood "product," finding wish fulfillment in the form of cheap and easy congratulation on their sensitivities and their liberalism.
- [on Stop Making Sense (1984)] Seeing the movie is like going to an austere orgy--which turns out to be just what you wanted.
- Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972) was presented for the first time on the closing night of the New York Film Festival, October 14, 1972: that date should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913--the night "Le Sacre du Printemps" was first performed--in music history.
- I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.
- [on Beverly D'Angelo] She's a wonderful actress and a delightful comedian. She's really a symbol of what's wrong with movies right now, that a woman so beautiful and talented can't seem to get lead roles. It's rough for a woman. She's been around for a while, so hey just don't think of her. But she's so gorgeous and so much fun to watch. Every time I see a movie with some bland new actress who "People" or "Entertainment Weekly" calls "Hollywood's hottest new star" I think, "How much more interesting that part would have been if Beverly D'Angelo had played it."
- It takes a certain amount of courage and audacity to stand by yourself and simply say what you think. There's a conventional response system that builds up. And it's safer to string along with what others are going to say. I mean, people don't really want to say how bad Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994) is. It's hardly possible to sit through the picture.
- [on Nothing in Common (1986)] This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
- I didn't dislike American Beauty (1999)--I hated it. It's not that it's badly made--it isn't. It has snappy rhythms and Kevin Spacey's line readings are very smart, and Annette Bening is skillful in the scene where she beats up on herself. But the picture is a con. It buries us under the same load of attitudes that were tried out in Carnal Knowledge (1971) and The Ice Storm (1997), with the nice trustworthy young dope-dealers of Easy Rider (1969). Maybe audiences are so familiar with this set of anti-suburbia attitudes that it's developed into its own movie genre.
- Top Gun (1986) is a recruiting poster that isn't concerned with recruiting but with being a poster.
- [on It's a Wonderful Life (1946)] Patronizing doggerel trying to pass as art.
- [on Robert Altman] He possessed a gift for creating an atmosphere of living interrelationships, and doing it so obliquely that the viewer can't quite believe it - it seems almost a form of effrontery.
- We generally become interested in movies because we enjoy them, and what we enjoy them for has little to do with what we think of as art.
- [on Lolita (1997)] I saw it and it depressed the hell out of me. I really love the [Stanley Kubrick] version. I still think it's one of the funnest things I've ever seen, and I don't know what the hell was going on in the remake, but they took the material seriously in all the wrong ways and they lost the humor that made the original so extraordinary. You know, for some of us, Shelley Winters' performance and James Mason's scenes in the bathtub are among the great treasures of moviegoing. And Peter Sellers was brutally funny. I don't think he was ever better.
- [on The Sopranos (1999)] The leading man had such a wonderfully vulgar charm. Watching the rise and fall of his gut was enough to keep you amused from week to week.
- [on The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)] I was held by it and had a very good time, though I didn't believe any of it.
- [on Stardust Memories (1980)] If Woody Allen finds success very upsetting and wishes the public would go away, this picture should help him stop worrying.
- Regrettably, one of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.
- [on Carl Theodor Dreyer] Carl Dreyer's art begins to unfold just at the point where most directors give up.
- [on The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)] A short 173 minutes, the picture has a whirling beauty.
- [on The Last Tycoon (1976)] Probably the first mistake was to approach the book cap in hand, and the next was to hire Pinter; the film needed a writer who would fill in what's missing - Pinter's art is the art of taking away.
- There is a brief passage in Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966) - Bibi Andersson tells about a day and night of sex - that is so much more erotic than all of Ulysses that it demonstrates what can be done on the screen with told material. We do not need to see images of the beach and the boy and the return to the fiancé that she describes because the excitement is in how she tells it. Bergman has the capacity to create images that set off reverberations: in the early part of Summer Interlude (1951), an old woman appears for just a moment on a road - walking - and this image, like the croquet game in Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), seems to be suspended in time. In moments like these, Bergman is a great artist. In Persona, Bibi Andersson's almost fierce reverie has that kind of beauty. As she goes on talking, with memories of summer and nakedness and pleasure in her words and the emptiness of her present in her face, we begin to hold our breath in fear that Bergman can't sustain this almost intolerably difficult sequence. But he does, and it builds and builds and is completed. It's one of the rare, truly erotic sequences on film.
- If ever there was a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art, The Godfather (1972)] is it.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content