A critic often has to play the role of coroner, dissecting a work to find out why it died (or never lived).

It's easy to say "This year in art sucked." After all, about 85 percent of all shows of contemporary art are bad. But 85 percent of all art made in the Renaissance was bad.

If I had to catalog all the moronic plot turns in The Day After Tomorrow, we'd be here until the next ice age. It's just so very bad. You can have a pretty good time snickering at it-unless, like me, you think there's something to this global warming thing, and you shudder at the irony of a movie meant to warn people about a dangerous environmental trend that completely discredits it. Is it possible that the film is a plot to make environmental activists look as wacko as anti-environmentalists always claim they are?

Every year, I'm depressed that so few of the documentaries I've loved break through.

Some reviewed 'The Master' on their knees, and while I respected its distinctive discordancy - can a movie be at once feverish and glacial? - I was unmoved.

The movie is a metaphor for the power of delusional hype--a metaphor for itself.

The English have a wellspring of comedy that will never be exhausted: the combination of bestial urges and excellent manners.