- Molly Haskell: "Diabolique" was the first French film I ever saw. First of all, it was set in this girls' school and I went to a girls' school and you had Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot sulking around having some sort of strange relationship... it sort of vaguely reminded me of some of the teachers in the girls school. And, then, the bathtub scene, which was the most terrifying, even after seeing "Psycho" or everything else, when you think someone's dead and then they rise. When Paul Meurisse rose, and I screamed, everyone in the audience screamed. I knew then, if I hadn't known before, that the totally convulsive affect of the immediacy of movies.
- Stanley Kauffmann: The one common factor that everyone has, whether he's a peasant in Bolivia or the Pope in the Vatican, is that in some way film has touched him. In some way.
- A.O. Scott: Every film critic who thinks about the history of what we do and the great figures of the past, has to think about James Agee - who was really just the first great American movie critic. And he didn't invent it; but, showed what it could be as a form of journalism and a form of literature and a way of talking about the world.
- Michael Wilmington: The average level of Hollywood films went down a shocking amount in the 1980s. They had younger executives who believed that their job was just to appeal to a very young, basically teenage, crowd. I think their ideal viewer during that period was a 15 year old male in a shopping mall.
- Pauline Kael: We've always taken high culture very, very seriously. But, we haven't taken popular culture that seriously. And in recent years, we've begun to understand that perhaps popular culture affected people even more deeply than high culture.
- Stanley Kauffmann: [referring to Vachel Lindsay] He saw something that other saw to; but, he saw it more keenly and more memorably. And he wrote about it, that the arrival of film was a key moment in the history of human consciousness. That it was going to change the way people thought, dreamed, fantasized. The way they *shaped* their inner-selves.
- Richard Schickel: What I see of internet reviewing is people of just surpassing ignorance about the medium, expressing themselves *on* the medium.
- Elvis Mitchell: I knew a lot of people, a lot of black people, who read film criticism, who read film criticism, who go to the movies - its shocking, but, we do. And there wasn't anybody, any black person, really writing about it. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to do this, was to sort of prove that there was a place for black people in it. It was kind of as simple as that.
- Kenneth Turan: The 'auteur theory' states that the Director is the guiding intelligence, the guiding spirit, that, you know, the person that determines what the film is going to be like. And that you can see a through-line through all his work, no matter who the writer is, no matter who the cinematographer is, no matter who the actors are. That the Director's spirit, like, overwhelms everything else.
- Jonathan Rosenbaum: The best thing that can be said of a critic, that what they write is so singular and interesting, that you can't turn it into advertising.
- Pauline Kael: I hope that men will not give up exploring their fantasies; because, that's one of the most fertile fields in movies.
- Wesley Morris: There's always been a history of animus between critics and Hollywood... There's definitely a tension that you have between the machine that cranks out the product and the people who are responsible for interpreting its meaning.
- John Powers: I think everybody thinks they're a film critic. What actually qualifies you to be a film critic, at least professionally, is that somebody will pay you to do it. You know, there actually is no real qualification.
- Stanley Kauffmann: Into the film world came Vachel Lindsay, who wrote what is really the first serious book about film in this country, called, "The Art of the Moving Picture." It was published in 1915.
- Richard Schickel: Pauline and Andy and I looked at movies in a kind of amoral way, you know. We just wanted to see aesthetically what that movie was doing or not doing and we didn't give a rat's about, you know, what its affect was on the morals of a 12 year old who happened to see it. We were just movie people.
- Richard Schickel: Whether it was Fellini or it was Bergman or it was Truffaut or it was Kurosawa, it was fun to be a movie reviewer then; because, those were defining - movie moments for a reviewer or for the serious audience.
- Lisa Schwarzbaum: Molly Haskell, to women like me, was this kind of - mysterious goddess. Gorgeous. Smart. Living the intellectual life.
- Stuart Klawans: Criticism ultimately is about your relationship to this work, your relationship to the world, this work's relationship to the world, this work's relationship to other works. Its about all these shifting ways of being in the world. That's what criticism is about. It's about - thinking.
- Stanley Kauffmann: Earliest criticism was written by people that who had not grown up in an era of film. They were discovering film, so to speak, as they were writing about it.
- Owen Gleiberman: There really was an independent film revolution. And it's very real. It's produced a lot of great films, a lot of great filmmakers, and, not so incidentally, a lot of great criticism.
- Stanley Kauffmann: The times that film criticism had influenced film making, that doesn't matter. What does matter, I think, is that good film makers are happy that they exist in a culture in which good criticism exists.
- Lisa Schwarzbaum: My advice to kids who are coming through, when you know, journalism kids who come up to me and say, "How do I get to be you?", is say do everything else first. See the world, write about other stuff, have some life, wander around, take the wrong direction, keep going to the movies, have some experience, read books, watch television, go hiking, do all of that so that when you finally do get to write about films, if that's what you still really, really want to do, you have a perspective of which to do it.
- Andrew Sarris: I'm not a professional. I'm an *amateur*, in the French sense, someone who's engaged in something for the love of it. I'd rather do this than anything else in the world.
- Michael Wilmington: The Ebert and Siskel show is very important for kind of establishing the romance of movie criticism. They were the first movie critics who became a sort of big TV celebrities - and became TV celebrities because they were movie critics.
- Michael Wilmington: If you give people an expansive world of all cinema, all movies, if you include the movies they love and, then, show them the movies they could love, if, if, if they just expanded their vision a little, then I think you're performing a service. At least you're performing the service that I've always wanted to as a critic.
- [last lines]
- Roger Ebert: The telephone rang, I picked it up. The reader said, um, "We live near the Wilmette Theater, and they're playing Cries and Whispers. What can you tell me about it." And I said, "Oh, I think it's the year's best film." And the reader said, "Oh, that doesn't sound like anything we'd like to see." Now, how can you account for that? Um, that's human nature.