- An interview for Alfred Hitchcock was like a living autopsy.
- I have been told by people, that when I write that a film is wonderful, they are not going to see it and vice versa.
- In the days of Gary Cooper, James Stewart etc, film stars personified the better aspects of human nature.
- I think that the enormous emphasis on violence and sex and in particular violent sex, may not make rapists of us all, but it predisposes us to accept a kind of world in which these things happen.
- I'm of course disillusioned with what has happened to world cinema. Now cinemas in both Eastern and Western Europe are filled with the same blockbusters from Hollywood.
- We're not dealing with a creative industry, we're dealing with an imitative industry and what is imitated is the last big box office success.
- [on Tommy Boy (1995)] The only thing worse than contemplating the oafish antics on screen is imagining the audience of cretins for whom the film was made.
- [on Boat Trip (2002)] This isn't a bad film. It's an unspeakably bad film. It's so bad that you wonder where on earth the audience for it may be.
- Bulletproof Monk (2003) is worse than even I could make it sound; so I won't even try. One of the pathetic aspects of my job is having to sit through piles of swill like this, then make it read entertainingly. It defeats me this time. Just call it critic-proof, too.
- On Malice (1993): "One of the most shameless pieces of unadulterated trash."
- On Mr. Deeds (2002): "I doubt if an uglier, more contemptible hash of a classic film has ever been made. Al Sharpton and John McEnroe appear as themselves. You know a film from the company it keeps."
- On Bonnie and Clyde (1967): "A film from which we shall date reputations and innovations in the American cinema."
- On Ryan's Daughter (1970): "Instead of looking like the money it cost to make, the film feels like the time it took to shoot."
- On Formula 51 (2001): "The film was run for half an hour at the press screening with blaring music track and all sound effects, but with no intelligible dialogue save for barely audible bursts of 'F***', or derivatives thereof, every few minutes. When the glitch was corrected, we critics had to sit through the first 30 minutes again. It taught us one thing. You know a bad film even before it opens its mouth."
- On Lolita (1997) (1997): "It is all right, the film suggests, for a refined, cultured, cautious litterateur like Professor Humbert to pursue a child for sex, but not for a gross pervert like Quilty, who practices group sex - not fidelity to one, but promiscuity with many nymphets - and videos them in the bargain. Boogie Nights at Quilty's place: how vulgar! Not at all like Irons's distinguished academic in his pyjamas, surreptitiously jiggling his stepdaughter on his lap while the giggling child pretends to peruse a comic: a combination of the infantile, the indecent and the incestuous not rendered any less prurient by the post-production revelation that the male actor had a prophylactic cushion between his groin and his 15-year-old co-star's buttocks."
- On Fight Club (1999): An inadmissible assault on personal decency.
- On Dreamcatcher (2003): It's as if Stephen King sold off a job lot of plots that he couldn't fit rationally together, and William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan, respectively screenwriter and director (may God forgive them), hammered them into the shapeless, incoherent, bloody awful swill they have brazenly put their names to.
- [on The Avengers (1998)] As the weather gets worse, so does the film.
- On Scooby-Doo (2002): The dog doesn't speak two words of intelligible English I could understand and the big laugh comes from this computer-digitalised hound taking on its master in a farting and belching contest.
- On Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991): An abysmal, tedious, contemptible mishmash of ancient and modern.
- [on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)] 2001 deals everywhere in dispersal, boundlessness, mystery - concepts which the stupendous battery of special effects projects with an astronomical and scientific precision that shades ultimately into metaphysics and philosophy.
- [on Barry Lyndon (1975)] What he did for the future in 2001, Stanley Kubrick in Barry Lyndon has done for the past. He has projected us into an era of amazing strangeness. A piece of cinema to marvel at.
- [on Irreversible (2002)] It's pornography. The sole gimmick on which it stakes its preposterous claim to artistic integrity is to tell the entire story back to front. My contempt for the film extends to those mealy-mouthed commentators who fear to endorse it, but are politically incapable of damning it, and prefer to call it simply "controversial", or insist that society needs to stand by like the immobile camera for nine minutes and watch a simulated rape in an underpass in order to understand feminine vulnerability.
- [on Heat (1995)] A long film about very little. Heat is stoked with self-importance. In a word, overheated.
- [on Russian Ark (2002)] Round the Hermitage Museum in 99 minutes flat. Doesn't sound too revolutionary? Believe me, that's not how it plays. Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov takes us on the most brilliantly devised tourist path that the new technology can provide - in one single, uninterrupted take via high-definition digital video. What marvellous preplanning, precise choreography, endless patience and near unbearable breath-holding this must have taken. I have never seen anything like it before. At first, you are watching how it is done. Then you forget technique and go with the flow. Truly a great film. There may be others like it: but none will ever again make us feel we have burst through a new frontier of cinema.
- [on The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)] A stunning film and a major work. By far the boldest reinterpretation of Christ I have ever seen. It adds a dimension to divinity that ecclesiastical authority will deny to its own loss and not Jesus Christ's.
- [on Shining Through (1992)] God knows, you'd have a hard time to dislike a film as stupid as this. It belongs to the ancient and great tradition of films so bad they're hilarious.
- [on The Age of Innocence (1993)] American cinema may have reached a turning point in the kind of film from which it makes its fortunes and its stars their reputations. It is a sumptuous triumph. The Age of Innocence may herald the return of the age of narrative.
- [on Dirty Pretty Things (2002)] Here at last is a movie with a social heartbeat that pumps new blood into our anaemic cinema.
- [on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)] The whole production exudes a contempt for viewers.
- [on Mulholland Drive (2001)] It makes no sense at all and arrogantly intends to make none.
- [on A Heart in Winter (1992)] French film-making at its finest.
- [on Hook (1991)] Over-dressed, over-decorated, above all overlong - I thought I'd been sent to Everland.
- [on First Knight (1995)] Purists will be furious. Historians will be incredulous. Critics will be hilarious. It is not often that the genuine Hollywood vulgarian adds a new chapter to our national heritage. The event should be commemorated somehow. But I do not believe this will be achieved at the historic site called a box-office.
- [on Open Your Eyes (1997)] You can find a hint of Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), or Mme Leprince de Beaumont's story La Belle et la Bête. But then being replete with surreal imagery, it contains hints of almost anything you may want to find. The eyes have it: whether or not this includes a meaningful story, apart from its razzle-dazzle factor, is more debatable.
- [on Day for Night (1973)] If you want a film that will send you away actually liking the people in it and chuckling retrospectively over two hours of blissful entertainment, then don't miss it. A work of love and craftsmanship.
- Bitter Moon (1992) packs a surprise ending: the sort, though, that makes you kick yourself for sitting through more than two hours of pseudo-erotic rubbish to get to - to this? But then as Coyote says to Grant, with the back-handed compliment of the born bore: "Not many men would have listened to so much for so long. You'd make a very good analyst." At which a fair number of us watching Bitter Moon were disrespectful enough to interject out loud - "or a film critic".
- [on With a Friend Like Harry... (2000)] A thriller that would have made Hitchcock grind his teeth in envy.
- [on One Fine Day (1996)] Clooney is one of those people who look like Identikit composites of a man you might suspect of being a star. But I can't warm to him. He's all surface, which is characteristic of TV-serial performers who suddenly get enlarged to cinema-screen size.
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