Best 16 quotes of David Denby on MyQuotes

Art talk is punk. Let the movie do your speaking for you.

Corporate irony not only ridicules the thing it is selling but the very act of selling it. In the process it disarms critics by making anyone who goes against the flow of commerce seem clueless.

Crash is hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive. I think it's easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, though it is not for the fainthearted.

Entertaining the reader is a good function.

Mi-yammi! The extraordinary city, with its Judeo-Cubano population, its mix of surgical-appliance and sex-fetishist obsessions, takes the American melting pot past the boil. It represents pretty much everything Patrick J. Buchanan hates.

Never throw fruit at someone who understands the theatrics of the situation better than you do.

The action comes at us through a buzz of nattering remarks.

The director, Antoine Fuqua, relies on small details, which anchor the vigilante-as-saint myth in at least a minimal degree of reality.

The greatest all-around American film actor is James Stewart.

The Nazis, for him, are merely available movie tropes--articulate monsters with a talent for sadism. By making the Americans cruel, too, he escapes the customary division of good and evil along national lines, but he escapes any sense of moral accountability as well. In a Tarantino war, everyone commits atrocities. Like all the director's work after 'Jackie Brown,' the movie is pure sensation. It's disconnected from feeling, and an eerie blankness--it's too shallow to be called nihilism--undermines even the best scenes.

The problem of criticism is not judgment but evocation - conveying the particular emotional and visual feel that the movie has.

Trivial details have been summoned, in part, to make a satirical point about upper-middle-class marriage-that the whole thing can slip away between the white wine and the arugula salad.

You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.

If you don't read books, and if you don't get consumed by the physical and moral life of men and women in fiction and history, too many facets of yourself may never come into being.

Snark often functions as an enforcer of mediocrity and conformity. In its cozy knowingness, snark flatters you by assuming that you get the contemptuous joke. You've been admitted, or readmitted, to a club, though it may be the club of the second-rate.

The trouble with today's snarky pipsqueaks who break off a sentence or two, or who write a couple of mean paragraphs, is that they don't go far enough; they don't have a coherent view of life. Spinning around in the media from moment to moment, they don't stand for anything, push for anything; they're mere opportunists without dedication, and they don't win any victories.