When I saw HISTORY OF THE WORLD, PT. 1, there were hisses and walkouts during this number, and the film has been attacked as a disgrace by reviewers in the press and on TV. I bet nobody hissed or walked out on Candide. (1981)

Literate people like the literate sound, the commas in place. It all stands for decorousness, for safety. I think they mistake their priggishness for high standards. (1994)

Steven Spielberg is probably the most gifted American director who's dedicated to sheer entertainment. He may have different aims from the aims of people we call artists, but he has integrity: it centers on his means. (1977)

Elaine May has the rarest kind of comic gift: the ability to create a world seen comically. Her satirist's malice isn't cutting; something in the befuddled atmosphere she creates keeps it mild—yet mild in a thoroughly demented way, mild as if impervious to sanity. (1972)

Probably young audiences can no longer relate to what the Westerner stood for, but are they supposed to like Redford because he's so sheepish and silent and straight? Hell, so was Lassie. (1972)

Robert Altman is almost frighteningly nonrepetitive. He goes out in a new direction each time, and he scores an astonishing fifty per cent—one on, one off. (1972)

These movies do speak to something in the culture, which is a desire to regress, to believe in certain kinds of values that never did operate. It's very strange, because FORREST GUMP was made by a director who's done some of the most cynical, funny movies I've ever seen. (1994)

PARADISE LAGOON (1957)

Cast on a desert island where there are no classes, where skill and aptitude count, the servant becomes master, the master servant. This will hold few surprises for audiences; still there's something rather satisfying in the demonstration.

Approaching filmmaking as a political act and trying to reach a large audience by putting political material into popular forms, the writers and directors have found themselves sacrificing meaning to thrills, or thrills to meaning. (1973)

Fellini is an unparalleled extrovert, even for a profession rich in extroversion; he is so extroverted he has abandoned interest in characters and is interested only in his own projections. (1972)

[RAGING BULL] By removing the specifics or blurring them, Scorsese doesn’t produce universal—he produces banality. What we get is full of capitals: A Man Fights, A Man Loses Everything, A Man Bangs His Head Against the Wall. (1980)

Other actors might communicate a thought or emotion with an economical gesture, but Nicholson does it with his whole body, as if he were electrically prodded. (1974)

What is getting older if it isn’t learning more ways that you’re vulnerable? (1989)

The American public is a sucker for the corrupt tastefulness of well-bred English epics. (1970)

Visconti is a major director who likes to work on a large scale, synthesizing ideas from the classics, but his work is frequently cold and flawed, and ambitious in ambiguous ways, (1970)

I think Woody Allen knows that the free and messy is the right, great direction for his comedy, but he's very well organized, and, like most comedians, he really trusts success. He trusts laughs, and how can a comedian tell when they're not earned? (1973)

[Sex scenes] have become extremely banal. For a number of years the couples rolled over each other endlessly, and now the scenes work so hard to try to give you some new angle...There just isn’t much way to photograph those scenes and do anything with them. (1993)

[Elaine May] Her satirist's malice isn't cutting; something in the befuddled atmosphere she creates keeps it mild—yet mild in a thoroughly demented way, mild as if impervious to sanity. (1972)

I don't think De Niro's really been a great actor for a few years now, but he gets all this reverential treatment. (1991)

[PROMISE AT DAWN] The film is narrated back and forth in time; but Dassin's feeling for the different periods isn't strong enough to clue us in on where we are and when, so the different parts of the past run together in a blur, as if his time machine had got too oily. (1971)