Cinema Criticism Quotes

I vote in the Academy, so I get all the screeners. I'm so often disappointed by all the material and especially by what wins. I find myself never voting for the winner.

Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.

Cinema is so slow and boring compared to television.

I am hard put to think of a single positive thing that commercial Hindi cinema has achieved.

Frank Capra, Hollywood's Horatio Alger, lights with more cinematic know-how and zeal than any other director to convince movie audiences that American life is exactly like the 'Saturday Evening Post' covers of Norman Rockwell. 'It's A Wonderful Life,' the latest example of Capracorn, shows his art at a hysterical pitch.

Every time I make a picture the critics' estimate of American public taste goes down ten percent.

Hollywood movies are designed for 15-year-old youths from North Dakota who, intellectually speaking, are on equal terms with a British zoo animal.

Criticism is okay from people who know the finer points of cinema.

I studied classics, and I find it mystifying that we had Medea and Electra and Antigone and all these amazing characters, and they don't really exist in cinema now. The only person who's really doing it, and he gets loads of criticism for it, is Lars Von Trier.

There are only two types of cinema - good or bad.

For me, the film has to be incredibly bad to make me want to pack up and leave.

I don't think 'Citizen Kane' stands more than one watch. Power corrupts. Who didn't know that?

There was supposedly no point showing 'Nightbreed' to critics because the people who see these movies don't read reviews, in brackets, even if they can read at all! Immediately it was disqualified from serious criticism. Therefore, it had to be sold to the lowest common denominator.

What bothers me is that the cinema - what Fox News calls the "wholesome cinema that our children are supposed to be able to see" - is so violent. I'm not even talking about the content. I'm talking about the way in which it's cut.

Over time I began to realize that the level of cinema criticism in the last part of XX century in the United States was pretty low. The institution itself is not what it's supposed to be, and I realized that I didn't need to take that seriously.

Most of the movies nominated for Oscars put me to sleep.

Well, I'm a consumer as well. I go to the movies with my popcorn and believe everything I see.

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've written not milestones of cinema but millstones.

To me, the darkest film ever made and the film, to me, that's the darkest picture in the human humanity's soul is 'Pretty Woman.'

You can't expect critics to appreciate all kinds of cinema.

Given that most movies are bad, and that there are whole categories and sub-categories of badness - the sequel, the Madonna Movie, the Friday 13th Series, or Movies Starring John Travolta Before Pulp Fiction - it is almost impossible to choose a single film for worst movie of all time. But strangely, I do have a nomination and I believe it is actually the worst movie ever made. It is Boxing Helena. The director is David Lynch's daughter, and the film comes with the almost insane-making faults that the family connection might imply.

I don't know a single person that's like, ''Avatar' is my favorite movie.' It never even comes up. I don't know anyone that will defend that movie.

Every year there's a jury at the Cannes Film Festival. Getting on the jury is very competitive in France. Not because the French love cinema, but because they love to judge.

As a principle, I will never react to film criticisms. As long as they are part of film fraternity, whatever they say will be beneficial to cinema.