Occupation: Film Critic Birth: June 19, 1919 Death: September 3, 2001
I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when….
Robert Redford ... has turned almost alarmingly blond-he's gone past platinum, he must be into plutonium; his hair is coordinated with his teeth..
The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing….
Imagining [The Wizard of Oz] without Judy Garland is a bit like dancing on wet cement: you can do it, but why would you want to?.
The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new.
In San Francisco, vulgarity, "bad taste," ostentation are regarded as a kind of alien blight, an invasion or encroachment from outside. In Los Angele….
A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel ….
It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don't have the patience to ….
If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it's that the good ones never make you feel virtuous..
Movies that are consciously life-affirming are to be consciously avoided..
If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn't have any feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too..
Television represents what happens to a medium when the artists have no power and the businessmen are in full, unquestioned control..
There is something spurious about the very term 'a movie made for TV,' because what you make for TV is a TV program..
Television as we have it isn't an art form - it's a piece of furniture that is good for a few things..
For perhaps most Americans, TV is an apppliance, not to be used selectively but to be turned on - there's always something to watch..
Movies, far more than the traditional arts, are tied to big money. Without a few independent critics, there's nothing between the public and the adve….
We will never know the extent of the damage movies are doing to us, but movie art, it appears, thrives on moral chaos. When the country is paralyzed,….
It is a depressing fact that Americans tend to confuse morality and art (to the detriment of both) and that, among the educated, morality tends to me….
Before seeing Truffaut 's Small Change, I was afraid it was going to be one of those simple, natural films about childhood which I generally try to a….
There is, in any art, a tendency to turn one's own preferences into a monomaniac theory..
Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery..