Top 40 Wesley Morris Quotes

Robert Pattinson has the face of a film-noir dupe. It’s a face that is searching and open and kind. It’s a face that a certain type of woman might want to fool because, in its intensely old-fashioned kindness, the face says, I love you. Fool me.

What about Hong Chau? In typical supporting-part fashion, she shows up halfway through ‘Downsizing,’ already shrunk, an imperious Vietnamese house cleaner with a limp and sharp angles. The movie’s satirical cleverness upstages its rage; then Ms. Chau proves she’s capable of managing both.

I feel like I’ve always approached criticism with a degree of morality, right? Like, not as a moralizer, but just as somebody who wants to make sure that the culture we’re getting is at least morally aware of how it’s functioning.

Spare a thought for ‘Suburbicon’ as it swiftly vanishes from America’s megaplexes. This is George Clooney’s movie about – well, I’m not sure. It’s supposed to be the sort of movie that doesn’t get made much anymore: starry, not that expensive, ‘middlebrow.’

Movies are visual, aural, they involve people, and life, and ideas and art, they are so elastic. They can hold anything, withstand everything, and make you feel anything. Other arts can do that, but movies are the only ones that can incorporate other media into cinema.

‘Polisse’ is the sort of cop thriller where people do things like angrily bang on a desktop or sweep everything off it. If it happens once, it must happen six times. But every time it did, I wanted to stand up and cheer, which I’ve never wanted to do for any such thriller.

This country is rich with awful things to say about everybody. There’s a slur for you and a slur for me – more than one. And because we’re terrified of dealing with them head on, we’ve made them just as easy to warp and defang.

Computers are scary. They’re nightmares to fix, lose our stuff, and, on occasion, they crash, producing the blue screen of death. Steve Jobs knew this. He knew that computers were bulky and hernia-inducing and Darth Vader black. He understood the value of declarative design.

‘Bloodlight and Bami’ is all verite. The director Sophie Fiennes began filming Ms. Jones in the mid-2000s and simply observes her on stage and off. She follows her home to Jamaica, where the diva mellows, almost unconsciously, into a daughter, sister, and parishioner.

‘The Tree of Life’ is a collection of conversations that lost souls and true believers have with themselves while keeping their heads to the sky. But the movie is church via the planetarium.

In ‘The One Who Falls,’ three women and three men, in everyday clothes, negotiate each other while moving, often in unison, on a giant spinning tile.

‘Three Billboards,’ which is not based on a true story but does have some reality flavoring, must appear worthy of elected office in some way. This was, at first, the illusion presented by the people running the campaigns and, in turn, over the years, has become the custom for lots of us.

‘Bloodlight and Bami’ delivers. Ms. Jones shucks her own oysters – stressfully. She does her own make up and performs her own vexed yet amusing contract negotiations.

Sidney Poitier became a star in part by helping black and white Americans negotiate their new relationship in the post-Civil Rights era.

Mr. Clooney has directed six movies; five are set in the middle of the previous century. And ‘Suburbicon’ clarifies why. Race is a blind spot.

I like Rob Morgan in ‘Mudbound.’ Most of the attention being paid to this movie has focused on Rachel Morrison’s cinematography and Mary J. Blige’s stiff but intensely stoical performance.

Sidney Lumet’s chief preoccupation wasn’t art. It was right and wrong in the American city, nearly always in New York.

In movies, there are some things the French do that Americans are increasingly incapable of doing. One is honoring the complexities of youth. It’s a quiet, difficult undertaking, requiring subtlety in a filmmaker and perception and patience from us.

Anyone who watches a lot of television, or listens to pop music, is familiar with a certain vision of America. If not exactly colorblind, this America is one in which different races easily interact, in which a white person might have an Asian boss, Hispanic stepson, or African-American frenemy.

No, I don’t know why Bobby and Peter Farrelly bothered with a ‘Three Stooges’ movie, either. But if they’re anything like some men I know, their love for Moe, Larry, and Curly (and an assortment of fourth bananas) is deep, abiding, and unembarrassable. In other words: How could the Farrellys not?

There’s power in turning to the past to illuminate the current state of things.

The reason to do any barking – well, the reason for me – is that ‘Three Billboards’ feels so off about so many things. It’s one of those movies that really do think they’re saying something profound about human nature and injustice.

Poor decisions and bad luck are contingencies of most horror films.

‘Suburbicon’ feels like a last gasp of some kind of middle. It thinks it’s both frivolous and serious. But, for that, you need a touch that George Clooney’s never had.

Sunken-place entrants include Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, Tiger Woods, O.J. Simpson, sometimes Kanye West, and any black person with something nice to say about President Trump. It’s more generous than ‘sellout’ and less punitive than ‘Uncle Tom,’ a dis and a road to redemption.

If Judge Steven T. O’Neill sent Mr. Cosby away for the rest of his life, that sentence couldn’t undo what he’s convicted of having done to Andrea Constand, his accuser in two trials. It also can’t undo what he once did for me, which was to make me believe in myself.

Lesley Manville comes at ‘funny’ from a totally different direction in ‘Phantom Thread,’ using snootiness and froideur. The effect of her performance – as the difficult manager of her difficult brother’s couture dress business – stems in part from the chill she puts into her line readings.

When a black person is acting up or showing off, somebody might say she’s ‘wilin’ out.’ In sports, an athlete who really takes it to another level has entered ‘beast mode,’ which happens to be the nickname of the former Seattle Seahawks superstar Marshawn Lynch.

‘Playboy’ operated with a patina of civility that granted the average man a presumption of pleasure that went one way – his. And that permission flourished in the psyches of all kinds of men.

Nudity has never seemed to bother Grace Jones. Her art has thrived, in part, on a physical candor that both shocked people and redrew the boundaries of taste, beauty, and eroticism around her masculinity, ebony skin, and unrelenting intensity.

The difference between me and, say, the opera critic is that I’m charged with thinking about the world beyond opera. I could go see ‘Die Fledermaus’, for instance. I’ve never done any of this, by the way. I’ve never written about one opera since I’ve had this job.

‘Savage’ is a trait that might get you into business school or retweeted 10,000 times. It’s what a kid might say after somebody does something awesome or gnarly or fierce: ‘Oh, that’s savage!’ It’s the skate park. It’s the high-school cafeteria. It’s the YouTube comments section.

The relief of ‘Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami’ is that it seeks to square the person with the provocateuse.

We don’t yet call it ‘Thxgvng,’ because any holiday whose centerpiece sits in an oven for four to six hours, after having sat out for as long to reach room temperature, must be spelled all the way out. Cook a turkey. You’ll see. This is to say that you’re not just roasting a turkey, obviously.

Most Pixar films are better than most live action films.

Part of what’s mesmerizing about ‘The Mechanics of History’ is its physical eloquence – how dancerly it is. The men don’t fall; they float. And when the trampoline restores them to the staircase, they move at a half speed. Cinema, they say, is 24 frames per second.

American popular culture has long been marked by an absence of empathy for American Indians. Westerns doubled as a campaign against so-called savages in a way that desensitized us to the savages we’d become.

‘The Dictator’ lands somewhere between wan Mel Brooks and good Adam Sandler, whose ‘You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,’ about an Israeli Special Forces soldier at a hair salon, manages to strike better contrasts with vaguely similar culture differences – it’s a nuttier movie, too.

When Oliver Stone and Woody Allen came forward to express sympathy for Mr. Weinstein, everybody rolled their eyes at them, too.

There is a tragic kind of joke. You really can’t keep a man down – good but often otherwise – because history’s mechanics are built to keep him climbing toward the top. Somehow, Icarus gets to be reborn as Iron Man.