Quotes About Film Critics

#1. I have cultivated a little crew of people whose opinions I understand. It's like the way you'd follow certain film critics because you know what their criteria are, and you may not agree with them, but you can glean from their opinion how you will feel about a film.

Daniel Clowes

#2. The boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It's unbelievable. The film critics don't know my artwork and the art world doesn't know my films.

Agnes Varda

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. My father was an engineer, .. But I found out that the film critics for the Stanford Daily got free passes for all the films. So I became first an assistant critic and then the main film critic. Those free passes changed my life.

Roger Corman

#6. I don't have any bone to pick with critics. In fact, if I wasn't a filmmaker I would probably be a film critic. Most of my bone is I would be a better film critic than most of the film critics I read.

Quentin Tarantino

#7. I mean, the old film critics just excoriated me.

John Milius

#8. Film critics said I gave a voice to the fear we all have: that we'll reach a certain point in our lives, look around and realize that all the things we said we'd do and become will never come to be - and that we're ordinary.

Ann Bancroft

#9. There was a cultural war going on, the '60s was going on. All the film critics were square.

John Waters

#10. But you can still find good films if you read your local film critics and are willing to drive a bit. You have to be a proactive film viewer to have the most provocative cinema life.

Stephen Hunter

#11. I built my [early] career on negative reviews. There was a cultural war going on, the '60s was going on. All the film critics were square. They hated my movies. You could never have that happen today. Critics are way too hip.

John Waters

#12. I love magazines and film critics, so I eat it up. I'm not one of those people who says 'I never read anything.' I generally read all of it.

Judd Apatow

#13. 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

#14. I'm happy that people have loved my film and my work. I have always let my work do the talking, and I guess I have proved to my critics that I'm not over.

Rani Mukerji

#15. The film I think was a good film for what it was designed for. It was for kids. Unfortunately the critics slashed it before it even started but that is just the way the cookie crumbles.

Justin Guarini

#16. Would it be nice to win a film award one day? Yes. But the critics are going to have to wait till I'm ready. Right now, my gift is making big movies that audiences want to see.

Brett Ratner

#17. '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

#18. Some day I'll make a film that critics will like. When I have money to waste.

Francois Truffaut

#19. When I had been a film critic for ten minutes, I treated Doris Day as a target for cheap shots. I have learned enough to say today that the woman was remarkably gifted.

Roger Ebert

#20. There's a lot of vitriolic ranting out there, but there are literally hundreds of critics on the web who care deeply about film and having something to say about it.

Richard Roeper

#21. Sometimes the critics will like a film, and the public doesn't come. Sometimes the critics won't like the film, and the public will come. It's completely spontaneous. It's a hazard.

Woody Allen

#22. Critics have never been able to discover a unifying theme in my films. For thatmatter, neither have I.

John Huston

#23. When critics love your film, you love critics. When they hate your film, you hate critics. It's the same everywhere, but maybe especially in France, where we have pretty good critics, except for three or four newspapers that are really dogmatic.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet

#24. If you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.

Pauline Kael

#25. film is and has always been just a subset of animation - in contrast to how critics presented the relation - if animation is understood to be the inputting of life, or the inputting of the illusion of life, into that which is flat or inert or a model or an image.

Karen Beckman

#26. Films are dreams. Many, many critics say to me that my films are not good because they are too unbelievable, but this is my style. I tell stories like they are dreams. This is my imagination. For me, it would be impossible to do a film that is so precise, that resembles real life.

Dario Argento

#27. Still, as much as I wish Ballistic Kiss could be a better film, the recognition it gained from critics and at festivals speaks for itself.

Donnie Yen

#28. Far from being a pack of baying butchers,critics sometimes have a perverse habit of tending to the sick and wounded on the cinematic field of battle, rushing in where angels fear to tread, even when the patient is clearly without a pulse.

Mark Kermode

#29. The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.

Orson Welles

#30. When you're doing a film, it's your film and it's, you know, your blood and - is in it along with everybody else's, and it's the greatest picture ever made when you're shooting it. It's only after the critics and then the public say you were wrong that you realize that you were wrong.

Richard D. Zanuck

#31. Critics in particular treat CGI as a virus that's infecting film.

Peter Jackson

#32. A film cannot make it into the culture without the support of critics.

Bennett Miller

#33. There are many critics who invite me on their show, and I have told them that when my film releases, you will give it one-and-a-half star rating. That's fine. There's no issue because stars will matter when I'm planning to open a five star hotel. When I'm making films, I don't need stars.

Rohit Shetty

#34. People think I'm against critics because they are negative to my work. That's not what bothers me. What bothers me is they didn't see the work. I have seen critics print stuff about stuff I cut out of the film before we ran it. So don't tell me about critics.

Jerry Lewis

#35. Like some of my other movies, 'Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes' is also a very political film, and many critics still consider it even the best of all the Apes movies, because it conveys a series of political viewpoints.

J. Lee Thompson

#36. There's so many intangible forces that come into play when making a film, I have no idea what the public will ultimately think of something that I do, let alone critics.

Leonardo DiCaprio

#37. The only thing that surprised me about 'Lincoln' is that most of the critics who reviewed the film seem not to have grasped what should have been apparent right from the start, which is that 'Lincoln' is at bottom a play with pictures, not a screenplay.

Terry Teachout

#38. You become a film critic because you're interested in film. I don't know whether knowing so much about cinema leads you to make better films, but it certainly can't hurt.

Michael Haneke

#39. But he meant beauty in the sense of its organic connection to the material. And this is the connection that, for me, separates true stylists from decorators. The decorators are easy to recognize. That's why critics love them so.

Sidney Lumet

#40. In city after city, newspaper after newspaper has diminished its staff of critics, sometimes to zero. Film and T.V. critics have been dropped and not replaced. Maybe they're deemed unnecessary because nobody cares if anything's good or not.

Tom Shales

#41. I wish all critics, no matter their color, were more sophisticated when it comes to the moral questions a film like 'St. Anna' is trying to raise.

James McBride

#42. I'm telling you, every film I've ever made has been hated by the U.K. critics.

James Gray

#43. Even the European critics ... They said Hostel is the smartest film they'd seen on capitalism and how it's gone too far.

Eli Roth

#44. In the 1970s, a lot of critics didn't understand video. I got a lot of bad reviews. But film-makers didn't understand what we were doing, either. There were actual fistfights between film-makers and video-makers. I was witness to one.

Bill Viola

#45. I am relatively familiar with getting a good old rumping from the critics. In some cases, the critics just didn't like the film - fair cop. Others, I think, didn't understand it.

Guy Ritchie