Quotes & Sayings About Movie Critics

It's hard to market a movie when you're at the mercy of critics and journalists. — Harvey Weinstein

Roger Ebert was such a champion of underrepresented filmmakers. He was a very big deal to me. It shows the power of critics. People who write about film, like you, can really affect the confidence of a young filmmaker. He did that for me, so it was such a pleasure to have an opportunity to talk about Roger in the movie. — Ava DuVernay

One would have a strong case for arguing that it was the men in her life - the lovers, the father, the directors, producers, critics - who destroyed it. And yet when you looked at the broad sweep they appeared more as agents, collectively, of a darker, wider force of ruin that pursued her. It was as if her epic beauty somehow angered the gods and drew down a suitably Promethean punishment; and the girl behind the beauty - the nice girl from Connecticut who at the end would wonder whether, if her life had been a movie, she would have been cast to play her part - found she had wandered off the lot into a Greek tragedy. [On Gene Tierney] — Paul Murray

When picking a show, I took into consideration who my fans are. Let's be honest, Buffy was a mid-season replacement on The WB, based on a failed movie. If it wasn't for the outpouring of fans and critics supporting us, we would have been canceled after four episodes. Sure, you want to stretch and you want to do different things, but it's also our job to think about who our fans are and what they want to see. Ultimately, that's why we do. — Sarah Michelle Gellar

During the course of any normal day, I usually pay more attention to assembling a grocery list than I do to reading movie reviews, although there are a more than a few film critics who bring huge insight to their work. — Mike Barnicle

If film critics could destroy a movie, Michael Bay and Adam Sandler would be working at Starbucks. If film critics could make a movie a hit, the Dardenne brothers would be courted by every studio in town. — Alonso Duralde

Nothing feels worse than knowing that people didn't see your movie. That they wanted to and the critics loved it but nobody knew where it was because it didn't do what it was supposed to do opening weekend. It used to be that independents were allowed to stay in the theaters, build word of mouth. — Allison Anders

The whole movie thing has never been a source of great pride for me, in that Burt Reynolds, who starred in the picture, butchered the original script I had written for the late Steve McQueen, and the result, while a massive moneymaker, was lashed by the critics. But like the old joke about Pierre the Bridge Builder, The Cannonball Run is indelibly inscribed on my so-called career portfolio, and few conversations with strangers pass without the subject of the picture arising. — Brock Yates

All critics have the responsibility to tease out the social ideas and social problems in a movie. I don't feel an obligation to do that because I'm black. — Wesley Morris

I wanted to get my movie noticed WITHOUT spending any ad money. So I made a bit of a spectacle. I recorded lots of podcasts. I bickered with hate groups. I criticized critics. I banged pots together. I did everything I could to raise awareness without raising any money to do so. — Kevin Smith

But then foreign critics right away made sweeping comparisons to haiku, noh theater, and directors like Ozu, as if the movie were somehow representative of Japan - which was, well, not what I was after. Similarly, with After Life, I deliberately set out to make a movie that was unlike what I imagined the foreign conception of Japan to be, and I figured non-Japanese wouldn't find it interesting at all. — Hirokazu Koreeda

I love to go to the movies with people, but a lot of the time it's me in a room with a bunch of other movie critics, which is fine. — Wesley Morris

Some very eminent critics writing in the decades immediately after the novel's publication felt that Eliot failed to maintain sufficient critical distance in her depiction of Ladislaw
that she fell in love with her own creation in a way that shows a lack of artistic control and is even unseemly, like a hoary movie director whose lens lingers too long on the young flesh of a favored actress. Lord David Cecil calls Ladislaw 'a schoolgirl's dream, and a vulgar one at that,' while Leslie Stephen complained 'Ladislaw is almost obtrusively a favorite with his creator,' and depreciated him as 'an amiable Bohemian. — Rebecca Mead

I was born into a world full of 'specialists'. I'm not sure whether it's the result of our education system or just natural entropy, but it's very uncommon to know a poet with even a mediocre knowledge about art, or an artist with a good taste in poetry, and so on and on. What this really is: lack of general education in a structural sense: god knows how many people I've met that are actually PROUD about proclaiming their ignorance about another field: it is as if it signifies their 'devotion to one path' while in reality they really only look like a buffoon if you ask me. New is that I am encountering 'Literary Critics' that proudly proclaim to 'never have read any foreign poetry' as if a 'movie critic' that only has watched Dutch films would be somehow capable of criticizing them in any true sense of the word. — Martijn Benders

Those critics awards come and go every year, but the finished movie is your work. — Scott Rudin

A mother of a one-year-old boy is a movie star in a world without critics. — Allison Pearson

'The Dark Knight' is a really good movie that reached both critics and mainstream audiences. — Anurag Kashyap

Why movie and dance critics are taking 'The Company' seriously, I can't imagine. Are they impressed by Altman's reputation and naive sincerity? By the fluid semi-documentary approach? — Robert Gottlieb

I'm told we movie critics praise movies that are long and boring. — Roger Ebert

But then when I'm in a halfway successful movie, it irritates the hell out of the critics in New York, because they'd like to kill my pictures if they could. So maybe I'm pretty good in the movie. Then they use all these words like I'm 'surprisingly' good, or 'shockingly enough,' I'm good. It's like I crawled out from under a magazine and they're surprised I can act. — Burt Reynolds

No, writing musicals is the hardest thing in the world. And it was really funny, because I remember when the South Park movie came out, there were some critics that said, 'Well it's obvious that in order to get it to be 90 minutes they filled some time with music.' — Trey Parker

Kids are so fiercely opinionated, that if they love the Harry Potter books and they go see the movie, they'll be the first to say, 'That was wrong! They didn't get that right!' They're storytellers themselves. They're critics. They're going to have the critical opinion. — Spike Jonze

Just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It's so formulaic and unsurprising that you wouldn't dare re-create it in a movie. All the critics would mock it. They'd all say the screenwriter was a hack who didn't even try. This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend - movies can't show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people. — Chuck Klosterman

What's happening to movie critics is no different from what has been meted out to book, dance, theater, and fine-arts reviewers and reporters in the cultural deforestation that has driven refugees into the diffuse clatter of the Internet and Twitter, where some adapt and thrive - such as Roger Ebert - while others disappear without a twinkle. — James Wolcott

There are television critics, movie critics, and theater critics too who I like and who I follow and I get genuinely bummed when they don't like something that I've written because I usually agree with them. — Aaron Sorkin

Well, it's so cheesy to say but you can't find a comedy director who makes movies for critics. When a movie does $580 million worldwide, I'm not saying that proves anything except people were enjoying the experience. — Todd Phillips

I think the biggest challenge was being aware of a certain audience that was going to see this film [lone survivor]. There's a big difference from a typical movie, journalists and critics and film goers that go see it find that, that's the general experience you have as a filmmaker. So that just kind of proves my point that there's a really different audience. — Peter Berg

Many of the critics today get airline tickets, hotel accommodation, bags, beautiful photographs, gifts and other expenses paid by the distributors, and then are supposed to write serious articles about the movie. — Wim Wenders

There was a lot of anger among critics that I had not made a sexy movie. — Mary Harron

There are a few critics overseas, and occasionally a critic will write an astute analysis of the movie. There is value in reading critics that actually have something intelligent to say, but the journalistic community lives in a world of sound bites and literary commerce: selling newspapers, selling books, and they do that simply by trashing things. They don't criticize or analyze them. They simply trash them for the sake of a headline, or to shock people to get them to buy whatever it is they're selling. — George Lucas

So how critics will perceive your film or your work, or whether your movie is going to make $100 million at the box office, or whether you are going to be winning any awards - well, you have no control over that. — Charlize Theron

We have gotten some terrible reviews at times but if we depended on the judgment of the studios or critics, we never would have made more than one movie. — Ismail Merchant

It's hard to explain the fun to be found in seeing the right kind of bad movie. — Roger Ebert

I don't care what reviewers think. If somebody hates a performance of mine, I kind of get a kick out of it. It amuses me when critics take something so irrelevant as a movie so seriously. — Stephen Baldwin

For instance, I love the movie Casablanca. Who doesn't? No matter how many egghead critics declare Citizen Kane to be the greatest American movie, we all know it's Casablanca in fact. — Andrew Klavan

It's over. The franchise is dead. The press killed it. Your magazine f**king killed it. New York Magazine. It's like all the critics got together and said, 'This franchise must die.' Because they all had the exact same review. It's like they didn't see the movie. Got any more gum? — Chris Noth

In private some critics have come up to me afterwards and told me they honestly enjoyed the movie. Then they'd tell me that they're still going to have to write it up negatively. — Joe Pantoliano

We're all so jaded. We've seen so many movies. We know what's going to happen in every single movie. I mean, there are some movies where I'm like why do I even need to keep watching? And so, if you can make a movie in which you're completely surprising the audience left and right, and left and right, then you've won. If a jaded film critic or reporter or an audience is like, "I didn't see that one coming," that to me is like a victory. — Richard Shepard

In the end, all critics should be guided by this one principle: Is this piece of work [TV show, movie, play, concert, album, restaurant] succeeding at what it set out to do? — Hank Stuever

Recently, I took my son to see The Haunted Mansion, which was one of the worst things (I hesitate even to call it a movie) that I have ever seen. He thought it was better than Finding Nemo and we had a fruitless argument which I'm sure made him acutely aware of the disadvantages of having a film critic for a dad. — A.O. Scott

My fellow critics and I may occasionally fault a movie for departing, in detail or in spirit, from its literary source, but the grousing of a few adult pedants is nothing compared to the wrath of several million bookish 10-year-olds. Their presumed demands, and the hovering spirit of Harry's creator, J. K. Rowling, inhibit this movie as it did the first Potter film. — A.O. Scott

Look, it's nice. I like the fact that critics liked this movie, but most of the movies that I've made, you'll find a handful of people that love it and more than a few other handfuls of people hate it. If I was invested in that, I would've given up long ago. — David Fincher

'Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,' while not nearly the masterpiece proclaimed by many critics, is certainly a fascinating cross-species: a big-budget summer action fantasy with a sylvan, indie-film vibe, and a war movie that dares ask its audience to root for the peacemakers. — Richard Corliss