film-critics

"I find that violence is very ambiguous in movies. For example, some films claim to be antiwar, but I don't think I've really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war."

"“I’m too drunk to handle this right now. I’m going to need you to be the adult in the room tonight.” “Asshole, I’m drunk too.” “Yeah, but you’re better at it than I am.”"

"“We have to help them,” said Ezra. “I don’t think we can.” “You have a plasma gun and you’re smart. What else do you need?”"

"This must be a field day for the end-is-nigh, compound-dwelling, bullets-and-Bibles folk. They must feel so vindicated. If there was any comfort to find at the end of the world, it was knowing you were right all along and that was about it."

"No one wants to think they are the cause of their own misery."

"“Let me ask you something.” “Okay!” “Are we good guys or are we bad guys?” “We’re good guys.” “Well, good guys only do terrible things when our lives depend on it. And we have to feel bad about them afterward.” “Why?” “Because otherwise, we become the bad guys.”"

"This was not a time of civility or compassion, but of survival."

"I learned long ago that, when anyone spoke of peace, be it man or machine, they meant war. Peace through war. Peace was the standard. It was the inert state of all things. You didn’t need to expend energy for peace. Only war."

"What good is it surviving the end of the world if there are still stupid rules about what grown-ups can do and kids can’t?"

"Survival is worthless without meaning."

"For as long as humankind can remember, it has wanted two things: to play God and to breathe life into the objects around them. And for thousands of years, humans created machines to approximate life and magic and all the things men and women could not do. And then a man stood in front of a roomful of people and had a computer say, “Hello.” That’s it. Hello. It didn’t mean it. It didn’t know what it was saying. But it said it. Hello. And within thirty years, humans were having conversations with their phones."

"Filmmaking has now reached the same stage as sex—it’s all technique and no feeling."

"A satirist, often in danger himself, has the bravery of knowing that to withhold wit's conjecture is to endanger the species."

"Boston is one of the few American cities that regrets the past...Boston's like England. Up to its ears in yellowing photographs."

"It would be unfair to suggest that one of the most characteristic sounds of the English Sunday is the sound of Harold Hobson barking up the wrong tree."

"Black and white are the most ravishing colors of all in film."

"Rosalia is dressed in raven clothes forty years too old for her, so that she seems to be in mourning for her life."

"Why is it that beautiful women never seem to have curiosity?" "Is it because they know they're classical? With classical things the Lord finished the job. Ordinary ugly people know they're deficient and they go on looking for the pieces."

"People in a temper often say a lot of silly, terrible things they mean."

"Jokes are ideally pleasurable. They are an act of assassination without a corpse, a moment of total annihilation that paradoxically makes anything possible."

"Russians have always been hugely concerned with ethics and hardly at all with conduct."

"Nothing is less funny these days than the state of movie comedy."

"Watch his mind as it contemplates a hostile universe whose violent whims Buster understands, withstands and, miraculously, tames. Watch his camera taking his picture (Keaton directed or supervised all his best films); it is as cool as the star it captured in its glass... The medium was still in its infancy; comics were pioneering the craft of making people laugh at moving images. Keaton, it turns out, knew it all — intuitively."

"She's less one of the inner echelon of elder statesmen issuing judgement, and more your incredibly well-viewed friend who particularly loves genre movies, but also beer and cats."

""The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist," said Verbal Kint (paraphrasing Charles Baudelaire) in The Usual Suspects. This might have been true back in Kint's heyday, but nowadays it's depressingly obvious that devils do indeed exist, clad in the trappings of politics, religion or super-wealth as they sow conflict, contagion, oppression and conspiracy theories throughout the world."

"The truly radical sub-text, however, is that a heroine can be politically motivated, a good dancer, attractive to the opposite sex, and fat all at the same time."

"No film I ever saw was any more dramatic than the story of my parents, whose marriage was so soon overtaken by a tragedy that received huge publicity and effectively destroyed the happiness of both."

"To publish a book on the "100 best films of the century" is really putting your head on the block, even if that "best" is qualified as "personal". Derek Malcolm's choice strikes me as sound and stimulating, a mixture of the conservative and the adventurous."

"Jeanne Moreau was the perfect choice for Catherine: she gives a performance full of gaiety and charm without conveying an empty-headed bimbo. She makes the watcher understand that this is no ordinary woman whom both men adore. It is possibly the most complete portrait of any feminine character in the entire ouevre of the New Wave and it made her an international star."

"[How Malcolm began a film critic] I was on the Gloucestershire Echo and wrote to Brian Redhead, who was the Manchester Guardians arts editor, asking if I could write about the Cheltenham literary festival. He said I might send my piece in and it was published, and he told me to come and see him. I knew Redhead was a socialist and if he knew I was at Eton and Oxford I would never get a job. So he asked me where I went to school and I said: "Somewhere near Slough". I ended up as a designer, and then called down to London where I was the late-night sub and the only one who could read the reviews by Neville Cardus [the renowned music critic and cricket correspondent] who submitted his copy in longhand. I became the letters editor, and – because I had been an amateur jockey in the 1960s — the racing correspondent. I was also the deputy drama critic to Philip Hope-Wallace, who took great delight in sending me to review Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs. I became the film critic because the editor fired the existing critic, Richard Roud, for writing a one-word review of The Sound of Music — he just wrote "No". Just that."

"Jules et Jim seemed revolutionary at the time, but Truffaut's revolution, unlike Godard's, implied not so much the destruction of the past as a turning back to the humanism of Vigo, Renoir and the French cinema of the 30s. The film's "rondo of love" represents both a backward glance at the best of the past and a forward glance into the cinema's future. Its enthusiasm for what the cinema is and can be is what makes it so special."

"I've had the luck if that is what you call it to get stuck in a lift with the great Orson Welles and his large wolfhound to take tea with Charlie Chaplin and to interview the always testy John Ford. Ford hated critics and had stomach trouble at the time He summoned me into the room as follows: "Come on in. I can deal with two shits at once"."

"Personally, I regret the absence of Sirk, Boetticher, Donen, Vertov, Tourneur, Whale, Kazan, Boorman, Malle and Roeg, but recognise that Malcolm is making a statement by omitting Spielberg. There are no Australian directors represented, and no SF flicks. All lists reveal something about the compiler, and there's a lot of sex and socialism here."

"For [[w:Thomas Mann|[Thomas] Mann]]'s interior dialogue is substituted some of the most ravishingly wrought images Visconti has ever committed to the screen. Aschenbach’s arrival at the Hotel des Bains of the early century is meticulously detailed and observed. His first sight of the boy, in the bosom of his Polish family, his sniffing out of the cholera epidemic which suddenly decimates the tourists, his ill-at-ease attempts to refurbish himself with the help of the hotel barber, all these episodes could scarcely be better done in terms of direction, art direction and acting. True, the camera lingers lovingly on what has been created. There are times when Visconti scarcely seems concerned about moving the story onwards. Yet it serves its purpose quite as well at Mann’s prose. It is in the final half hour that one's doubts grow, as the boy smiles and smiles at the man, and the man visibly dies under the untouching assault. Perhaps it is here that Dirk Bogarde's otherwise superb performance shows a bit at the seams. We become aware that he is an actor acting, manoeuvring a mask, and that Visconti is watching him do it, lost in admiration."

"For the kinema must please the women or die. The vast majority of picture-goers are women and always will be. The time o day is in their favour, to steal an odd hour from me afternoon; and woman, whose work lies at home, just as glad of the opportunity to escape from home for an hour us ma, whose work lies outside, is glad of the opportunity to be in it. The price too, is a woman's price, easily found. When a man spends money, he likes to feel he is spending; when a woman spends money, she likes to feel she is not."

"Throughout his career he has unashamedly hopped from one outside influence to another in an attempt to clothe the content of his films in a form which will surprise and shock. He has sloganised, fantasised and parodied as well as presenting us with neo-realism, documentary and even Chekovian pastiche. But that is only the half of it. His films also show the seminal influence of a great deal of Indian popular and folk culture. He will beg, borrow or steal from anything to form an appropriately striking style and, for all that, still remain resolutely his own man."

"All [[w:Mrinal Sen|[Mrinal] Sen]]'s films, even his most lightweight, have attacked, with undisguised horror and anger, the poverty, exploitation and inherent hypocrisy of Indian society. That is why he has remained a hero for so many of the young, who criticise [[w:Satyajit Ray|[Satyajit] Ray]] for a lack of overt political commitment and wish to see a truly revolutionary Indian cinema undiluted by European classicist and humanist sympathies. Yet, like Ray, he is certainly not a specifically Indian director whose films show no outside influences at work. In fact, it is almost impossible to talk with him – and he is an indefatigable talker – without constant reference to European, Russian and particularly English culture, often literary rather than cinematic."

"But I was thrilled to bits just to see them and I asked my mother at the interval whether I could meet them. She asked the theatre manager and he came back with a note. It said: "Yes, but don't bring your mother …" The manager took me to the door of their dressing room and knocked, but left before Hardy answered the door. "Come in, young man," he said. "We have tea and buns on the way for you. This is Stan, by the way, as you can see by his hat. He seldom takes its off, even in bed." I was tongue-tied. But when the tray of tea and buns came in, I tucked in enthusiastically. Whereupon Hardy took a bun from the tray, placed it on his chair and sat on it. It was, of course, squashed flat. I'm pretty sure he did it to amuse me. But you never knew with Hardy, who preferred playing golf to working."

"A new film by Alfred Hitchcock is usually a keen enjoyment. Psycho turns out to be an exception. There follows one of the most disgusting murders in all screen history. It takes place in a bathroom and involves a great deal of swabbing of the tiles and flushings of the lavatory. It might be described with fairness as plug ugly."

"It is an odd and somewhat ironic commentary on the entertainment of the times that the best, happiest, most intelligent and human picture of the week, I was about to say of the year, should be a murder story. But so it is: The Naked City (Gaumont and Marble Arch) is a thriller and a beauty."

"[On the new CinemaScope process] The effect produced on the viewer is to make him feel he is sitting inside a monster pillar-box looking out through the slot at a world in the rough proportions of a dachshund. For views of processions, or wide horizontal sweeps of plain or water this does not work out badly, but it comes hard-on actors who have to 'exchange confidences from the opposite, sides of a proscenium arch."

"I couldn't give away the ending if I wanted to, for the simple reason that I grew so sick and tired of the whole beastly business that I didn't stop to see it. Your edict may keep me out of the theatre, my dear Hitchcock, but I'm hanged if it will keep me in."

"It would seem that Gone With the Wind, written by a woman, concerned with a woman, and read by millions of women all over the world, is working out on form. That is to say, it is primarily a woman's picture. I say that advisedly, not to suggest that men won't like it, but because I am so sure that women will. It may not be a great, significant picture, with a strong, central theme, but I don't honestly believe that women care so much about great, significant pictures with strong, central themes. What they prefer, and what they will get in Gone With the Wind is a vivid account of personal and intimate details of this meeting and that quarrel; [life] seen not broadly, in perspective, but urgently, from day to day, as if they were living it themselves. Women are only dimly concerned with the meaning of what is happening in the world, but passionately concerned with the effect of what is happening on So-and-So. The American Civil War. the abolition of slavery, the burning of a city, the end of a social order, even the birth of a nation, would hardly in themselves justify the film's three hours and forty minutes of running-time. But in order to discover what happened to Scarlett O'Hara, to Melanie. to Rhett Butler, to the black mammy, to Scarlett's baby, during these events, most women will sit through this enormous picture without a murmur. Curiously enough, the dominant feminine interest in the picture has worked through even to the acting. The best performances are all women's."

"They have not only given us a first-class detective story but they have added the suggestion that this sort of thing might impinge on any one of us, unknowingly, on our way home from business; but would not in the end affect a community armoured with life and decency, private concerns, family responsibilities, mealtimes, bedtimes, train schedules and sunlight. The film has been shot almost entirely, and most magnificently shot, in the streets, homes, stores, and Government departments of New York, and I have never seen a picture that expressed more fundamentally the difference between the extraordinary person who practises crimes of violence, and the normal, blessedly ordinary person who doesn't. The Naked City is at once keen observation and grand filmmaking."

"It's a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom (Plaza). This so-called entertainment is directed by Michael Powell, who once made such distinguished films as A Matter of Life and Death and 49th Parallel."

"I don't propose to name the players in this beastly picture."

"Les Efants du Paradis, which opens the Rialto for a new season of French films, is the crown of the French cinema, and must be an abiding delight to anyone, in any country, who feels the stir of the world of art."

"Oliver Twist (Odeon, Marble Arch) is the third of the Dickens novels to be filmed, with conscious solicitude, in this country; and while it is obviously very much better than Nicholas Nlckleby, I cannot think it as good a picture as Great Expectations. Possibly the fault lies in the choice of subject: for Oliver Twist, let us face it, is a pretty ugly story. ... And while it is one thing to read about the violent and vicious and sordid experiences that attended the progress of the poor-house boy, it is quite another to see them acted. The only essential difference between Oliver Twist and the modern gangster tale is that the former is written superlatively well."

"Its true concern, however, is with something much larger and more impalpable; the relationship between the crowd and the individual; the impersonal, jubilant, clamorous voice of the multitude, and the personal, agonisingly articulated dumbshow of a man. You have to go to literature, to the novels of Dickens and Dumas, to find crowd scenes so superbly and massively handled. The changing scene is packed with people; you fix your eye on an individual player, only to find him presently overwhelmed, submerged, drowned in a sea of faces. And rightly so, for that is the whole secret of Les Enfants du Paradis. The characters are initially thrown together by the crowd and eventually torn apart, like so much flotsam and jetsam."

"But I believe and I stick to it that there is a code in this sort of free-handed slaughter, and Hitchcock has gone outside the code in Sabotage. As a detective fan and an Inveterate reader of thrillers I suggest that this is the sort of thing that should get a fellow blackballed from the Crime Club. Discreet directors don't kill schoolboys and dogs in omnibuses. Believe me, it isn't done.."