Roger Ebert
Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.Collection: Intelligence
Most of us do not consciously look at movies.Collection: Movies
If a movie isn't a hit right out of the gate, they drop it. Which means that the whole mainstream Hollywood product has been skewed toward violence and vulgar teen comedy.Collection: Teen
No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.Collection: Good
If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.Collection: Car
There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.Collection: Death
I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip.Collection: Death
The right really dominates radio, and it's amazing how much energy the right spends telling us that the press is slanted to the left when it really isn't. They want to shut other people up. They really don't understand the First Amendment.Collection: Amazing
Every great film should seem new every time you see it.Collection: Movies
I've never found kicks to the groin particularly funny, although recent work in the genre of the buddy movie suggests audience research must prove me wrong.Collection: Funny
To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.Collection: Health
Movies that encourage empathy are more effective than those that objectify problems.Collection: Movies
It's a good question, because a movie isn't good or bad based on its politics. It's usually good or bad for other reasons, though you might agree or disagree with its politics.Collection: Politics
Parents and schools should place great emphasis on the idea that it is all right to be different. Racism and all the other 'isms' grow from primitive tribalism, the instinctive hostility against those of another tribe, race, religion, nationality, class or whatever. You are a lucky child if your parents taught you to accept diversity.Collection: Religion
We are the playthings of the gods.
Life is made up of challenges that cannot be solved but only accepted.
It is reckless to make broad generalizations about any group of people.
I'll tell you, I think that the Internet has provided an enormous boost to film criticism by giving people an opportunity to self publish or to find sites that are friendly.
A lot of people just go to movies that feed into their preexisting and not so noble needs and desires: They just go to action pictures, and things like that.
Reese Witherspoon is as cute as a button on Raggedy Ann's overalls, but irresistible raw sex appeal is not one of her qualities.
We can't help identifying with the protagonist. It's coded in our movie-going DNA.
Sarah Palin lacked the preparation or temperament to be one heartbeat away from the presidency, but what she possessed in abundance was the ability to inflame political passions and energize the John McCain campaign with star quality.
I begin to feel like most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out.
And I think both the left and the right should celebrate people who have different opinions, and disagree with them, and argue with them, and differ with them, but don't just try to shut them up.
One difference between film noir and more straightforward crime pictures is that noir is more open to human flaws and likes to embed them in twisty plot lines.
Nothing ever seems straightforward in Venice, least of all its romances.
Horror fans are a particular breed. They analyze films with such detail and expertise that I am reminded of the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye, who approached literature with similar archetypal analysis.
My motto: 'No good movie is depressing. All bad movies are depressing.'
Lebanon was at one time known as a nation that rose above sectarian hatred; Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. All of that was blown apart by senseless religious wars, financed and exploited in part by those who sought power and wealth. If women had been in charge, would they have been more sensible? It's a theory.
We think of first love as sweet and valuable, a blessed if hazardous condition.
I think we have to get beyond the idea that we have to categorize people.
When I am writing, my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be.
Catholic theology believes that God gave man free will, and you can't give somebody free will and then send in a play from the sidelines.
I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do.
Blockbusters run the mainstream industry. We may never again have a decade like the 1970s, when directors were able to find such freedom.
All over the web there are some very good critics and it's become for people who are interested. It's become a very good way to get to reviews and involve yourself in discussions.
Because I don't give the studios advanced quotes or an advanced look at my reviews. I think the readers deserve to read my reviews before the studios do.
But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.
By going to the movies, and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, moving around traveling, I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born into might have suggested.
Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film.
I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class.
I don't think Bush was legitimately elected President.
I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason.
I think that probably the - I don't give quotes to studios. They have to get those out of the paper or from television. So they wouldn't have had my quote opening day.
I'm kind of glad the web is sort of totally anarchic. That's fine with me.
If Hollywood stars speak out, so do all sorts of other people. Now Hollywood stars can get a better hearing.
It's funny that there was so much disturbance about having a Catholic in the White House with Kennedy, and when we finally get a religion in the White House that's causing a lot of conflicts, and concerns, and disturbances for a lot of people, it's in the Bush Administration.
Movies absorb our attention more completely, I think.
The Academy is paranoid about its image.
The movies that are made more thoughtfully or made or with more ambition often get just get drowned out by the noise.