If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.

Movies absorb our attention more completely, I think.

The problem with being sure that God is on your side is that you can't change your mind, because God sure isn't going to change His.

Every great film should seem new every time you see it.

By going to the movies, and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, moving around traveling, I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born into might have suggested.

It's a good question, because a movie isn't good or bad based on its politics. It's usually good or bad for other reasons, though you might agree or disagree with its politics.

I am utterly bored by celebrity interviews. Most celebrities are devoid of interest.

If a movie isn't a hit right out of the gate, they drop it. Which means that the whole mainstream Hollywood product has been skewed toward violence and vulgar teen comedy.

But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.

No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.

If Hollywood stars speak out, so do all sorts of other people. Now Hollywood stars can get a better hearing.

I think we have to get beyond the idea that we have to categorize people.

You can have a movie with hardly any cuts, or very few cuts, that is fascinating, you can't take your eyes away from it... Look at some of the long takes in Citizen Kane.

And I think both the left and the right should celebrate people who have different opinions, and disagree with them, and argue with them, and differ with them, but don't just try to shut them up.

The Academy is paranoid about its image.

I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class.

The movies that are made more thoughtfully or made or with more ambition often get just get drowned out by the noise.

Well, you know what, I'm 60 years old, and I've been interested in politics since I was on my daddy's knee. During the 1948 election, we were praying for Truman. I know a lot about politics.

I begin to feel like most Americans don't understand the First Amendment, don't understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don't understand that it's the responsibility of the citizen to speak out.

Most of us do not consciously look at movies.

A lot of people just go to movies that feed into their preexisting and not so noble needs and desires: They just go to action pictures, and things like that.

I don't think Bush was legitimately elected President.

I think that probably the - I don't give quotes to studios. They have to get those out of the paper or from television. So they wouldn't have had my quote opening day.

We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn't have to be white, and the other one doesn't have to be the ethnic sidekick. We're way over that. And I think it's happening in society, too.

All over the web there are some very good critics and it's become for people who are interested. It's become a very good way to get to reviews and involve yourself in discussions.

I think most people are more susceptible to prejudice than to reason.

The right really dominates radio, and it's amazing how much energy the right spends telling us that the press is slanted to the left when it really isn't. They want to shut other people up. They really don't understand the First Amendment.

I'm kind of glad the web is sort of totally anarchic. That's fine with me.

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.

If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.

I'll tell you, I think that the Internet has provided an enormous boost to film criticism by giving people an opportunity to self publish or to find sites that are friendly.

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

It's funny that there was so much disturbance about having a Catholic in the White House with Kennedy, and when we finally get a religion in the White House that's causing a lot of conflicts, and concerns, and disturbances for a lot of people, it's in the Bush Administration.

Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film.

Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.

Catholic theology believes that God gave man free will, and you can't give somebody free will and then send in a play from the sidelines.

' The Lucky One' is at its heart a romance novel, elevated however by Nicholas Sparks' persuasive storytelling. Readers don't read his books because they're true, but because they ought to be true.

'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter' is without a doubt the best film we are ever likely to see on the subject - unless there is a sequel, which is unlikely, because at the end, the Lincolns are on their way to the theater.

'Grand Illusion' and 'Rules of the Game' are routinely included on lists of the greatest films, and deserve to be.

A few actresses have all but set up shop as women of a certain age who attract younger lovers. I think of Susan Sarandon, Cameron Diaz and Isabelle Huppert.

A film is a terrible thing to waste.

All but a very few of us are in debt. We exist as entities who borrow money and spend the rest of our lives making interest payments on a debt tally that never seems to budge. Whatever wealth we have, in labor, property or cash, is suctioned to the top.

Anyone who reads advice books about romance has one problem to begin with: bad taste in literature.

Are vampires kinky? I didn't know.

But considering that I walked in expecting no complexity at all, let alone the visual wonderments, 'Snow White and the Huntsman' is a considerable experience.

Clouds do not really look like camels or sailing ships or castles in the sky. They are simply a natural process at work. So too, perhaps, are our lives.

Dogs notice, they share, they draw conclusions, they like it when they're able to be of service and are touchingly grateful when they're praised.

From a dramatic viewpoint, there are few professions that grant their members entry into other lives, high among them cops, doctors, clergymen, journalists and prostitutes. Perhaps that explains why they figure in so much television and cinema. Their lives are lived in the midst of human drama.

Here's a notion: Peace in the Middle East would come about more easily if the region were governed by women.