Going to a movie so you won't be offended is like eating potato chips made with Olestra; you avoid the dangers of the real thing, but your insides fill up with synthetic runny stuff.

Gene [Siskel] often mentioned something François Truffaut once told him: the most beautiful sight in a movie theater is to walk down to the front, turn around, and look at the light from the screen reflected on the upturned faces of the members of the audience.

Because we can engineer genetics, because we can telecast real lives-of course we must, right? But are these good things to do? The irony is, the people who will finally answer that question will be the very ones produced by the process.

Movies are not about moving, but about whether to move.

We don't have a lot of class-conscious filmmaking.

In the best of all possible worlds, directors would obsess about the quality of their storytelling, and not the details of their technical methods.

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.