Quotes About Movies

I'll work with a director if I think I'm going to get into a comfortable situation, and if it's someone I respect and who respects me, even if they're not so well known. Movies are hard to make, and you have to work toward a common ethic and do your best.

Man, I love the 'Lord of the Rings' movies. Some people would say I'm weird for liking those types of movies, but they are so cool.

He had a collection of science-fiction films on DVD and Blu-ray discs, and although he said he'd seen most of them before, Caitlin was surprised to discover how many of the cases were still shrink-wrapped. "Why'd you buy them if you weren't going to watch them?" she asked. He looked at the tall, thin cabinets that contained the movies and seemed to ponder the question. "My childhood was on sale," he said at last, "so I bought it.

When you think about it, going to the movies is bizarre. Hundreds of strangers sit in a blackened room, elbow to elbow, for two or more hours. They don't go to the toilet or get a smoke. Instead, they stare wide-eye at a screen, investing more uninterrupted concentration than they give to work, paying money to suffer emotions they'd do anything to avoid in life.

We go to the movies to enter a new, fascinating world, to inhabit vicariously another human being who at first seems so unlike us and yet at heart is like us

We go to the movies to enter a new, fascinating world, to inhabit vicariously another human being who at first seems so unlike us and yet at heart is like us, to live in a fictional reality that illuminates our daily reality.

It's hard to explain the fun to be found in seeing the right kind of bad movie.

It is said that the human brain divides its functions. The right brain is devoted to sensory impressions, emotions, colors, music. The left brain deals with abstract thought, logic, philosophy, analysis. My definition of a great movie: While you're watching it, it engages your right brain. When it's over, it engages your left brain.

Never marry someone who doesn't love the movies you love. Sooner or later, that person will not love you.

So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I'll see you at the movies.

And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.

Siskel's Saw. It's amazing how many movies are not as interesting as a documentary of the same actors sitting around talking over lunch. GENE SISKEL

One of my delights in these books, on the other hand, has been to include movies not often cited as "great"—some because they are dismissed as merely popular (Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark), some because they are frankly entertainments (Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Rififi), some because they are too obscure (The Fall of the House of Usher, Stroszek). We go to different movies for different reasons, and greatness comes in many forms.

In literature, it's called plagiarism. In the movies, it's homage.

The movies that last, the ones we return to, don't always have lofty themes or Byzantine complexities. Sometimes they last because they are arrows straight to the heart.

The sad thing is that when movies like this fail, executives think that proves there's no audience for unusual, original pictures - because they think they've made one.

Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in The Fugitive.

Strange that movies about Satan always require Catholics. You never see your Presbyterians or Episcopalians hurling down demons.

A man goes to the movies. The critic must admit that he is this man.

It is a truism that Hollywood trailers advertise not the movie that has been made, but the movie that the studio wishes had been made.

We'd had a revelation. This was the direction American movies should take: into idiosyncratic characters, into dialogue with an ear for the vulgar and the literate, into a plot free to surprise us about the characters, into an existential ending not required to be happy.

Saturday Night Fever was Gene Siskel's favorite movie, and he watched it at least seventeen times. We all have movies like that, titles that transcend ordinary categories of good and bad and penetrate straight to our hearts.

The same impulse to unman a social or cultural threat gambols across the exchange with Eliot. "Why you haven't been offered the lead in some sexy movies I can only attribute to the stupidity of casting directors," writes the movie star to the dour literary man.

Isn't this what happens in the movies a lot? There's some old dude or woman who tells your fortune and is all, 'Oh, you're gonna die or make a boatload of money or meet a girl. Now give me all your cash'?" Boz yammered. Mrs. Smith bristled. "I can tell your fortune right now without even consulting your palm." "You can?" "Yes. You are an idiot. You will always be an idiot.