David Edelstein Quotes

#1. Cillian Murphy is the guy who battled viral zombies in '28 Days Later' and put a gas-spewing bag over his head in 'Batman Begins'. With his pallor, cut-glass cheekbones and glazed blue eyes, he's right on the border between dreamboat and spooky freak.

David Edelstein

#2. A critic often has to play the role of coroner, dissecting a work to find out why it died (or never lived).

David Edelstein

#3. My fears are the obvious ones: that marketplace-minded publishers - all four of them - will shy further away from literary fiction, international authors, poetry, and the other marginal but hugely important regions of the book world.

David Edelstein

#4. It's easy to say "This year in art sucked." After all, about 85 percent of all shows of contemporary art are bad. But 85 percent of all art made in the Renaissance was bad.

David Edelstein

#5. Every year, I'm depressed that so few of the documentaries I've loved break through.

David Edelstein

#6. Russell Crowe is normally an actor who disappears so far into his characters you'd swear his DNA has been altered.

David Edelstein

#7. I have a female colleague who gets annoyed that Tina Fey seems to go out of her way in her movies to deride her looks, as if she weren't such an attractive woman.

David Edelstein

#8. I'm more encouraged by the saplings: new music groups, tiny new venues, entrepreneurial musician-composers who aren't waiting to be discovered but are instead building their own Establishment.

David Edelstein

#9. Ever since the Tim Burton Batman of 1989, it has been de rigueur in movies to focus on the freaky alienation aspect of the superhero's life: This is how talented people make movies for 14-year-olds while retaining their self-respect.

David Edelstein

#10. I fell in love with Twitter. Fathers, lock up your deadlines.

David Edelstein

#11. The economic and technological changes are real, but I just can't bring myself to wax apocalyptic about the future of books.

David Edelstein

#12. Along with my peers, I gripe about the increasing number of superhero films, and I'm sad that so many critics so uncritically use words like franchise, which should be reserved for your local Burger King.

David Edelstein

#13. The movie is a metaphor for the power of delusional hype
a metaphor for itself.

David Edelstein

#14. You can feel righteous fury in every frame of The Magdalene Sisters. The movie is both a masterpiece and a holy hell: Watching it, you feel you're being punished for a crime you didn't commit. Which puts you, come to think of it, in the same frame of mind as those poor Magdalene girls.

David Edelstein

#15. The English have a wellspring of comedy that will never be exhausted: the combination of bestial urges and excellent manners.

David Edelstein

#16. Still, you can't complain about the number of movies being made. Never have the means of making movies been so accessible to so many. The problem is getting bodies into seats.

David Edelstein

#17. Despite some standout events, 2012 was demoralizing. The Met felt adrift, and New York City Opera couldn't claw its way back to artistic health.

David Edelstein

#18. Let me tell you, if your marriage is in trouble, skip the therapist and find a psycho. Nothing brings people together faster.

David Edelstein

#19. I think I can safely call 2012 average. Overall, it was a stronger year for nonfiction than fiction - a situation that would've surprised me back in January, when I was looking forward to big new novels from several authors I really love.

David Edelstein

#20. Some reviewed The Master on their knees, and while I respected its distinctive discordancy - can a movie be at once feverish and glacial? - I was unmoved.

David Edelstein

#21. My reaction to 'Sin City' is easily stated. I loved it. Or, to put it another way, I loved it, I loved it, I loved it. I loved every gorgeous sick disgusting ravishing overbaked blood-spurting artificial frame of it. A tad hypocritical? Yes. But sometimes you think, Well, I'll just go to hell.

David Edelstein

#22. The movie's only serious criticism is reserved for Baker's television network, which doesn't think Americans care about Afghanistan - kind of hypocritical given this film's lack of substance.

David Edelstein

#23. I'd put the most money on Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson - and not just because we'll probably still be waiting for the final volume in 2017.

David Edelstein

#24. The rise of video on demand will make it possible for small movies to earn back costs via $9.95 24-hour rentals and for people in cities without independent cinemas to see the kind of movies they never have before. That's great - but on the other hand, that's TV.

David Edelstein