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In Truffaut's style there is so much pleasure in life that the wry, lonely little piano player, the sardonic little man who shrugs off experience, is himself a beautiful character. (1962)

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In movies, judgment is often not so important in a critic as responsiveness to what a movie feels like, and where it's heading and what its vision is. (1994)

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Bergman's austerity of style—when it is applied to objectified material—is splendid. He is now a master at creating effects of dislocation without any need for the superficial apparatus of movie surrealism. (1968)

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THE ISLAND, striving for poetry, gives us endless repetition of simple tasks—plenty of time to observe that the carrying of those buckets has been choreographed as a stark ballet of human existence. (1960)

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HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940) The target in all these impudent, irreverent comedies was always America itself; no other country could so freely criticize and satirize itself. Ironically, this freedom was lost not because of governmental pressure but because of box-office pressure.

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The beauty of THE MOMENT OF TRUTH is not in bullfighting (Goya did not love war because he made great etchings of it) but in the beauty of rage, masterfully rendered in art. (1965)

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Streisand doesn't seem to have any limitations, but this domination could become one. It's impossible to tell from her first two movies whether she can act with people, because that hasn't yet been required. (1970)

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There really isn't any such thing as character in the world of TV commercials; there is only anonymous popularity: we are all models. (1965)

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Two human beings who are sexually and emotionally involved cause pain to each other, and it takes more skill than most writers and directors have to deal with that pain. (1976)

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[GHOSTBUSTERS] What’s surprising about Bill Murray as a performer is the amount of alertness and energy he pours into being burned out and bleary and blasé. He turns burnout into a style. (1984)

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We can’t, unless we’re stupid, ask film people to make movies the nice, stodgy way they (or their predecessors) used to. I can’t even review the $25 million dollar TORA! TORA! TORA! After a half hour, I fell into a comatose state; reprieved by the intermission, I sneaked away. (1970)

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GO WEST (1925) Not one of the great Buster Keaton comedies. It's perhaps unique among his films in that it aims for intense pathos; however, it's sad and funny at the same time—which wasn't true of Chaplin's pathos.

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There are individual movies that are wonderful now...But they don't tend to reflect the culture or to speak for the culture as directly. And I don't think they change us as much. (1989)

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The James Bond series has had its bummers, but nothing before in the class of A VIEW TO KILL. (1985)

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To excite an audience, you don't really need to believe in anything but manipulative skills — and success. If you're intelligent and work this way, you become a cynic; if you're not very intelligent, you can point with pride to the millions of people buying tickets. (1972)

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I enjoyed De Niro in his brief performance as Al Capone in THE UNTOUCHABLES. I liked him in BRAZIL. But in the big performances something sluggish and stolid has crept into his acting...I find De Niro heavy-spirited. (1994)

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There are movies that go off track but at least you know you're on a train. (1976)

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[THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER] It's ten-ton irony—Buñuel with lead feet. (1975)

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CASABLANCA (1942) Bogart became the great adventurer-lover of the screen during the war years. In this film he established the figure of the rebellious hero—the lone wolf who hates and defies officialdom (and in the movies he fulfilled a universal fantasy: he got away with it).

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Business becomes its own justification, and when staying in business becomes the only goal, everything can be explained in terms of needing to make money to keep other people employed. (1973)

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[MAS*H] The movie isn't naïve, but it isn't nihilistic, either. The surgery room looks insane and is presented as insane, but as the insanity in which we must preserve the values of sanity and function as sane men. (1970)

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[THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE] Buñuel is no longer savage about the hypocrisy and the inanity of the privileged classes. They don't change, and since they have become a persistent bad joke to him, he has grown almost fond of their follies. (1972)

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[FELLINI'S ROMA] Fellini interacts with no one; he is the only star, our guide, and, like many another guide, he often miscalculates our reactions, especially to his arch, mirthless anticlerical jokes. (1972)

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HEATHERS doesn't live up to the advance word. Yes, it's a collection of barbs and sick jokes, but it's not fun, and it lacks a punch line. (1989)

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Mastroianni has that gift that the greatest screen actors (as distinguished from stage actors) have of seeming to live the role so fully that we assume the character goes on about the business of living whether the camera is on him or not. (1970)

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HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940) Overlapping dialogue carries the movie along at breakneck speed; word gags take the place of the sight gags of silent comedy, as this vanished race of brittle, cynical, childish people rush around on corrupt errands.

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I was disappointed in GOODFELLAS, and I thought CAPE FEAR was just a terrible mistake. THE AGE OF INNOCENCE is really Merchant Ivory terrain. Even though Scorsese shows what he can do with it in some ways, he doesn't shape the material. I thought the movie disintegrated. (1994)

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[APOCALYPSE NOW] I think the people who love it are taking it as a head trip. They're going to get stoned on the sensual imagery...I think people who loved this one loved the carnage too. It sure doesn't make you hate war. (1980)

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We can all at least take it this far: don't talk about movies you don't care about one way or another. Concentrate on movies you love or hate, or your indifference will infect your students. (1995)

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I love being able to work at home. I hate getting dressed up and going to an office. It's wonderful to wear a pair of jeans and slop around in an old shirt, and go down to the kitchen and fix yourself something and take it back to your desk. (1982)

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Loving movies is a very peculiar love-hate relationship. I mean, you love what they can be, but you also love the crap they are. I have my limits, though. (1994)

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Worse than losing a love is holding it in your arms and not finding it. (1966)

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FOLLOW THE FLEET (1936) Astaire and Rogers at their most buoyant...The characters aren't as rich and sophisticated as in the best-known Astaire-Rogers movies but the corniness is alive.

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Lumet, after nine movies—and he is one of the best and most flexible of the TV-trained movie directors—still directs one-dimensionally. He cannot use crowds or details to convey the illusion of life. (1966)

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Nicholson is no flower-child nice guy; he’s got that half smile—the calculated insult that alerts audiences to how close to the surface his hostility is. He’s the people’s freak of the new stars. (1975)

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Half of the reason that people become interested in movies in the first place is sex and dating and everything connected with eroticism on the screen. I felt that not to deal with all of that in its most naked form was to shirk part of what's involved in being a critic. (2001)

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Robert Mitchum's strength seems to come precisely from his avoidance of conventional acting, from his dependence on himself; his whole style is a put-on, in the sense that it's based on our shared understanding that he's a man acting in material conceived for puppets. (1971)

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When Eastwood was fun in his early movies it wasn't because of his acting skill, and now that he has a little skill he's lost the spaghetti sexiness that made him fun. He's all sinews. (1994)

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[MOMMIE DEAREST] The nightmarish collision of temperaments begins to suggest a great subject: the horrible misunderstandings between all parents and children—their need to "correct" us, our need to spite them, our raw nerves they can pinch, theirs that we can press down. (1981)

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GRAND HOTEL (1932) Most of the players give impossibly bad performances—they chew up the camera. But if you want to see what screen glamour used to be, and what, originally, "stars" were, this is perhaps the best example of all time.

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[MELVIN AND HOWARD] The dialogue is as near perfection as script dialogue gets—it's always funny, without any cackling. (1980)

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There's a time-honored Hollywood device that enables those who compromise on all the important things to convince themselves that they're engaged in something of real importance: they give it social content. (1976)

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FISTS IN THE POCKET must surely be one of the most astonishing directorial debuts in the history of movies, yet it is hard to know how to react to the movie itself. (1968)

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I tend, when I get interested in a writer, to read everything...I love getting immersed in a sensibility. (1989)

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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. (1989)

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Rocky's unwordliness makes him seem dumb, but we know better; we understand what he feels at every moment. (1976)

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HUNGER (1966) Per Oscarsson plays a starving young writer—a performance with brilliant, glinting variations on self-mockery and paranoia...It's an intense and remarkable movie—a classic of the starving-young-artist genre.

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The first two GODFATHER movies are perhaps the best movies ever made in this country. It's unfair to ask a TV series to live up to that. But THE SOPRANOS had a quality of its own. It had its own humor. (2001)

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[RAGING BULL] What De Niro does in this picture isn't acting, exactly. I'm not sure what it is. Though it may at some level be awesome, it definitely isn't pleasurable. (1980)

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Sometimes it's better for comedy not to go first class: without the fanfare, the director is forced to keep his attention on what counts, and the performers don't get overpowered by the fruit and flowers. (1975)

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