There's no special moviemaking excitement in SAY ANYTHING, but Cameron Crowe is a real director—he loves actors. (1989)

[THE PRINCESS BRIDE] With his rakish little sliver of a mustache, Cary Elwes is preposterously pretty, like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in the thirties, and he has a flair for self-parody. (1987)

Fassbinder I never got with. I just didn't see what all the fuss was about. A lot of later Bresson didn't interest me. There are big names I don't care for very much. For me, Zhang Yimou joins Ozu and Tarkovsky. I find Zhang Yimou's pictures mostly very tiresome. (1994)

DUCK SOUP (1933) The Marx Brothers in their greatest movie—a semi-surrealist farce about war. With Margaret Dumont, Edgar Kennedy, and Louis Calhern. The unsentimental screenplay is by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, who also did the songs.

It is said that the Marx Brothers consider the 1935 A NIGHT AT THE OPERA their best film; it isn't, but it was their greatest hit. Two beautifully stuffed American targets—grand opera and high society—are left dismantled, flapping like scarecrows. (1967)

PRINCE OF THE CITY (1981) There's one remarkable performance (it's mostly in the last section): Jerry Orbach, as the tough-minded cop, Gus Levy, acts with such sureness and economy that while Williams is flailing about Orbach magnetizes the camera.

When language is debased to the level of the pitch man, why not use animal grunts? They're more honest, and they say more. (1955)

It’s a peculiar form of movie madness crossed with academicism, this lowbrowism masquerading as highbrowism, eating a candy bar and cleaning an “allegorical problem of human faith” out of your teeth. (1975)

If we don’t go to movies for excitement, if, even as children, we accept the cultural standards of refined adults, if we have so little drive that we accept “good taste,” then we will probably never really begin to care about movies at all. (1969)

[MEAN STREETS] Though the street language and the operatic style may be too much for those with conventional tastes, if this picture isn’t a runaway success the reason could be that it’s so original that some people will be dumbfounded—too struck to respond. (1973)

Criticism is an art, not a science, and a critic who follows rules will fail in one of his most important functions: perceiving what is original and important in new work and helping others to see. (1963)

[THE WARRIORS] The purplish cheap-thrill color is as deep and strong as what cinematographers used to get when Technicolor was still Technicolor, and it gives off a hot glow against the darkness. (1979)

MENILMONTANT (1924) One of the greatest of all experimental films—an exquisite, poetic 40-minute movie that is one of the least known masterpieces of the screen...The extraordinary editing is, at first, confusing and upsetting, and, finally, dazzling.

[REDS] I thought it wasn’t very good—and I wanted it to be good. I don’t think Beatty is a very good director. He’s a marvelous producer, but look at HEAVEN CAN WAIT, which was pretty minimally directed. (1982)

[SECRET HONOR] Philip Baker Hall draws on his lack of a star presence and on an actor's fears of his own mediocrity in a way that seems to parallel Nixon's feelings. (1984)

Bergman is not a deep thinker, but he is an artist who moves audiences deeply by calling up their buried fears and feelings. People come out of his movies with "something to think about" or, at least, to talk about. (1963)

It's depressing after all these years to find that some people think a critic's job is to be in synch with popular taste. It's depressing how many critics think that's a critic's job. (1991)

A movie director has two "worst" enemies: commercial failure and commercial success. (1963)

[HAVING A WILD WEEKEND] The movie seems to discover tentatively, with regret and bewilderment, that the cures are illusory, are only more symptoms. It's as if pop art had discovered Chekhov. (1965)

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955) As Jim, a high-school boy, James Dean was the archetypal misunderstood teenager in this generation-gap soap opera of the 50s, which had more emotional resonance for the teenagers of the time than many much better movies.

CALIGARI, the most complete essay in the décor of delirium, is one of the most famous films of all time, and it was considered a radical advance in film technique, yet it stands almost alone—and you'll know why. (1967)

[THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK] But when a film is a lump of message like this we can't help wanting to know if the moviemakers are on the level, or if it's a bald-faced big con, or if, maybe, they've turned themselves on in order to turn others on. (1974)

[ONE FROM THE HEART] When a director becomes the star of his movie—when his devices are chuckled over and applauded—the audience is, in a sense, applauding its own knowingness. And because it’s a knowing audience it expects a lot. The chuckles are anticipatory, eager. (1982)

If you really like something, writing becomes humbling and stirring. You give yourself to the work you're describing. You want to do it justice, and you want to share the pleasure it has given you. Writing about it intensifies your own pleasure. (1994)

If you could see the “artist’s intentions” you’d probably wish you couldn’t anyway. Nothing is so deathly to enjoyment as the relentless march of a movie to fulfill its obvious purpose. This is, indeed, almost a defining characteristic of the hack director. (1969)

A director who has had a box-office hit regards his success as proof that Hollywood now offers artists freedom. (1968)

After some of those worthwhile pictures from Europe we may feel we've earned the right to sneak out to a mindless, disreputable movie. I have a hunch that everybody (everybody I know, anyway) would go to see BARBARELLA even if it were much worse than it is. (1968)

RANDOM HARVEST (1942) The only reason to see this hunk of twaddle is the better to savor the memory of the Carol Burnett-Harvey Korman parody, which also was shorter. Mervyn LeRoy, who directed many a big clinker, also gets the blame for this one.

The imaginative moviemaker knows that there are no limits to what is possible in the movie medium, and belief in his own omnipotence rises in him like sap. (1981)

[BEETLEJUICE] Delia the sculptor, the madwoman who’s the new lady of the house, is played by the smudge-faced blond Catherine O’Hara, late of SCTV, and the possessor of the freakiest blue-eyed stare since early Gene Wilder. (She has sexy evil eyes.) (1988)

When you can see Bette Midler, people are willing to see her even in a second-rate movie. Or Lily Tomlin. Or that marvelous Catherine O'Hara in BEETLEJUICE. (1989)

[HEARTBURN] Catherine O'Hara is a Washington newswoman and all-around gossip who breezes into the picture a few times (not as often as you might like: she looks as if she knows giggly secrets). (1986)

[PERSONAL BEST] You watch the athletes' calves or some other part of them, and you get an exact sense of how their bodies work—it's sensual and sexual, and it's informative, too. This film celebrates womens' bodies without turning them into objects; it turns them into bodies.

[THE BLUES BROTHERS] When [Aretha Franklin] sings "Think," while wearing a waitress's uniform in the soul-food café she runs, she smashes the movie to smithereens. Her presence is so strong she seems to be looking at us while we're looking at her. (1980)

There are people who haven’t quite loomed up the way they may, but who, in small roles, like Catherine O’Hara, do stuff you’ve never seen before, like what she did in BEETLEJUICE. I mean, she’s an amazement. (1992)

TEMPLE OF DOOM doesn't have the serious undercurrents that RAIDERS had; it's less "sincere" — and that's what is so good about it. (1984)

In THE GOODBYE GIRL, Dreyfuss started to give up acting for being loved. His role, like many other roles written by Neil Simon, was both more and less than an opportunity: it offered a chance for opportunism. (1978)

THE PROFESSIONALS (1966) We're not always in the mood for love or for art, and this film makes no demands, raises no questions, doesn't confuse the emotions. It's as modern a product as a new car.

Representations of Americans in foreign films always feel wrong to an American audience. It is true we are shallow, but we are not carefree and irresponsible, we are shallowly serious. (1956)

[A WEDDING] Robert Altman's movies have been showing less attention to visual style for several years now, but this is the only one that opens like a blurry segment of "Masterpiece Theatre." (1978)

[ERASERHEAD] Lynch seems to have reinvented the experimental-film movement; watching this daringly irrational movie, with its interest in dream logic, you almost feel that you're seeing a European avant-garde gothic of the 20s or early 30s. (1977)

[THE DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND] But there are few flaws, and they're piddling ones. I don't really see how this movie could be much better. (1981)

[Renata Adler] What can you say of somebody who dismisses everything you’ve done? Really, what was being dismissed was movies. I felt that perhaps she was angry about popular culture in general. (1982)

Like so many other great figures in the theatre and the movies, Kazan has always been a precarious mixture of the crude and the sensitive. When that mixture goes out of balance—when he leans on us like an amateur—we want to know why. (1969)

POINT BLANK (1967) It's director John Boorman's virtuosity that is the star. Intermittently dazzling, the film has more energy and invention than Boorman seems to know what to do with. He appears to take the title literally; one comes out exhilarated and bewildered.

As an action director, Walter Hill has a dazzling competence. SOUTHERN COMFORT comes across with such immediacy that it had a near-hypnotic hold on me and I felt startled—brought up short—when it ended. (1981)

[APOCALYPSE NOW] Trying to say something big, Coppola got tied up in a big knot of American self-hatred and guilt, and what the picture boiled down to was: White man—he devil. (1980)

[BODY HEAT] The lovers sweat constantly—lavishly. But it might as well be dew. Kasdan's formal style doesn't allow for passion; if his actors had any he'd have to stamp it out. (1981)

Some artists become Jesus freaks; movie artists are more likely to become technology freaks. (1982)

Yesterday's interesting, difficult new directors become commercial, and their work becomes part of the film industry's anonymous product. (1968)