Manohla Dargis Quotes

The movie industry is failing women. And until the industry starts making serious changes, nothing is going to change.

American commercial cinema has long been dominated by men, but I don’t think there has ever been another time when women have been as underrepresented on screen as they are now. The biggest problem isn’t genuinely independent cinema, where lower budgets mean more opportunities for women in front of and behind the camera. The problem is the six major studios that dominate the box office, the entertainment chatter and the popular imagination. Their refusal to hire more female directors is immoral, maybe illegal, and has helped create and sustain a representational ghetto for women.

An acquired taste, this dense Jabberwocky-ish word salad is a political allegory about a populace that's been pharmaceutically duped into believing its wretched world is wonderful.

In truth, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” isn't about Sept. 11. It's about the impulse to drain that day of its specificity and turn it into yet another wellspring of generic emotions: sadness, loneliness, happiness. This is how kitsch works. It exploits familiar images, be they puppies or babies - or, as in the case of this movie, the twin towers - and tries to make us feel good, even virtuous, simply about feeling. And, yes, you may cry, but when tears are milked as they are here, the truer response should be rage.

NOTHING SHOULD BE TAKEN FOR GRANTED IN 'EVERYONE ELSE,' WHICH IS AT ONCE LAID-BACK AND RIGOROUSAbout the world we create when we fall in love, and how we navigate the space between us and that separating us from everyone else.

The great irony is that women are accused of making romantic comedies, as if it’s a bad thing, but Marc Webb makes a romantic comedy and he gets ‘Spider-Man.’ Are you kidding me? You cannot win.

The New World is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). There is some intense, bloodless violence and the beautiful underage lead actress (15-year-old Q'orianka Kilcher) may cause cardiac arrest among some viewers.

In scene after scene, meaning sneaks in and sometimes roars.

Dancer, bride, runaway wife, radical filmmaker and pioneer - Shirley Clarke is one of the great undertold stories of American independent cinema.

Paprika is evidence that Japanese animators are reaching for the moon, while most of their American counterparts remain stuck in the kiddie sandbox.

Mr. Lapid, making an electrifying feature directing debut, traces the line between the group and the individual in a story that can be read as a commentary on the world as much as on Israel.

Ben Stiller isn't funny - honest. Ben Stiller is very funny, and smart, and cute, too, in a neurotic, New York kind of way.

André Bazin wrote that art emerged from our desire to counter the passage of time and the inevitable decay it brings. But in “Boyhood,” Mr. Linklater's masterpiece, he both captures moments in time and relinquishes them as he moves from year to year. He isn't fighting time but embracing it in all its glorious and agonizingly fleeting beauty.

That Ms. Farahani found Mr. Mohassess and persuaded him to share his story is a terrific coup, even if a great deal of his life's work remains elusive.

In 1963 ... The Vatican condemned Dr. No as a 'dangerous mixture of violence, vulgarity, sadism and sex.' Ka-ching!

The weave of the personal and the political finally proves as irresistible as it is moving, partly because it has been drawn from extraordinary life.

It looked like Ben Stiller was one of the showbiz meteorites who was moving so fast he would soon have no worlds left to conquer.

By focusing on such a narrow slice of Nepali life, Ms. Spray and Mr. Velez have ceded any totalizing claim on the truth and instead settled for a perfect incompleteness.

Created for MTV in 1990, the sharply observed, pop-conscious Ben Stiller Show - featuring its star's lacerating impersonations of Bono, Tom Cruise, and Eddie Munster, among others - subsequently moved to Fox TV and copped an Emmy for writing.

Moment by moment, with a twitch, a shudder, a look, it’s Mr. Hardy who movingly draws you in, turning a stranger’s face into a life.

There isn’t anything good to say about Kick-Ass 2, the even more witless, mirthless follow-up to Kick-Ass.