Sidney Lumet's chief preoccupation wasn't art. It was right and wrong in the American city, nearly always in New York.

Sidney Lumet's chief preoccupation wasn't art. It was right and wrong in the American city, nearly always in New York.

Movies are visual, aural, they involve people, and life, and ideas and art, they are so elastic. They can hold anything, withstand everything, and make you feel anything. Other arts can do that, but movies are the only ones that can incorporate other media into cinema.

Straight white males: that's the predominant moviegoing category, and the persistence of that is a dismaying maintenance of the status quo.

I definitely have a kind of Stockholm Syndrome for superhero movies because it's very clear that's the era we're in. It's like Christianity in the Middle Ages.

I do feel a responsibility to address things that are problematic, but I don't have to go out of my way to do that.

The Dictator' lands somewhere between wan Mel Brooks and good Adam Sandler, whose 'You Don't Mess With the Zohan,' about an Israeli Special Forces soldier at a hair salon, manages to strike better contrasts with vaguely similar culture differences - it's a nuttier movie, too.