Quotes from Elvis Mitchell

If a movie requires the lead actor to spend a good chunk of his onscreen time talking to himself, and Popeye is unavailable because of contractual disputes, it's hard to do better than Johnny Depp.

You know what? As a black person, you see so much racism. Films are no different than the government, politics - it's everywhere. It's not exclusively film. It's infuriating to see it in film. But my being in film changes things.

The influence of John Hughes is fully felt in the melodrama 'Donnie Darko.' This first film written and directed by Richard Kelly is a wobbly cannonball of a movie that tries to go Mr. Hughes one better; it's like a Hughes version of a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

'The Third Man,' directed by Carol Reed and written by Graham Greene, is, quite simply, one of the finest movies ever made.

The director Sofia Coppola's new comic melodrama, 'Lost in Translation,' thoroughly and touchingly connects the dots between three standards of yearning in movies: David Lean's 'Brief Encounter,' Richard Linklater's 'Before Sunrise' and Wong Kar-wai's 'In the Mood for Love.'

There are storytelling traditions that come from Africa that are unique from anywhere else.

It is fun to see a comedy in which every single joke hasn't been packed into the trailer.

When Bruce Lee gets his cameo in 'The Green Hornet' - as one of the drawings in Kato's notebook - it clarifies what the film is: an unrealized sketch. A sketch can afford to allude to a point of view. Moviemakers need to show their point of view, something this shrug of a movie never gets around to doing.

It's more dangerous to be a friend or relative of Jackie Chan in the star's movies than it is to play the third yeoman on a 'Star Trek' episode.

Since most of 'Mean Girls' consists of the outsider Cady observing the tribal rites of her new setting and laying it all out in narration, this movie is just like home for the meticulous and ruthless deadpan that Ms. Fey has perfected for the satirical 'S.N.L.' newscast in which she and Jimmy Fallon are the anchors.

It may be a bit early to make such judgments, but 'Battlefield Earth' may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century.

The Wachowskis' use of space rivals that of musical directors like Gene Kelly and Mark Sandrich.

The battle scenes in 'Gladiator' don't have the exultant lift of Hong Kong period-action pictures like the 'Once Upon a Time in China' series, where the fights have the eye-popping panache of dance sequences from a musical.

Spending time with Mexican-born writer and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, you'd never guess that he's the filmmaker behind a series of movies known as the 'Death Trilogy.' The way he dotes on his children and talks about his wife makes it clear that he has a crackling passion for life.

Whom do you feel sorrier for: the cast of 'Boat Trip' or their children? Remember, kids can be very cruel - and this latest 'get Cuba Gooding Jr. career counseling fast' project is a misfire from beginning to end.

'Boat Trip' is more tiresome and dumb than actually bad.

Do you remember where you were when Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett died?

The idea of Seth Rogen as the Green Hornet so inflaming the fanboy community is amusing, since that group's 20/50 vision also had it tsking its disapproval about Michael Keaton as Batman and Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man.

Mike Mignola's 'Hellboy' comics have a drizzly, musty gothic ambience - the same fetid air that H. P. Lovecraft circulated in his fiction.

If Mr. Chan ever makes another movie like 'The Tuxedo,' it's American audiences that will see him in court. With 'Shanghai Knights,' he has come through with one of his best. This time, it's personable.

In 2013, when it turned out that the plot of LaBeouf's short film 'HowardCantour.com' (2012) had been purloined from graphic novelist Daniel Clowes's 2007 comic 'Justin M. Damiano', the actor-director responded with a series of tweet apologies that also appeared to be shoplifted.

My parents are from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and I feel like it's an old Southern thing where people say that, as a kid, you can be an astronaut or a ballerina or a singer, but as a grown person, you need to go and get a job.

For years, Ono's work - musical and otherwise - was, in large part, dismissed and derided; at best, it was often misunderstood.

'Ravenna' is, in many ways, the ultimate example of how a woman's perception of herself can lead to this horrible road being taken.