Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.

There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use of the only counter-balance: the freedom of the press to say that there's anything conceivably damaging in these films - the freedom to analyze their implications. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?

I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.

The words "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies

The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new

I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form (and to other experience as well) if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgments, if we are electic.

Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.