The Critical Task Is Necessarily

Watching Old Movies Is Like Spending An Evening With Those People Next Door. They Bore Us, And We Wouldn't Go Out Of Our Way To See Them; We Drop In On Them Because They're So Close. If It Took Some Effort To See Old Movies, We Might Try To Find Out Which Were The Good Ones, And If People Saw Only The Good Ones Maybe They Would Still Respect Old Movies. As It Is, People Sit And Watch Movies That Audiences Walked Out On Thirty Years Ago. Like Lot's Wife, We Are Tempted To Take Another Look, Attracted Not By Evil But By Something That Seems Much More Shameful -- Our Own Innocence.

What Is Getting Older If It Isn't Learning More Ways That You're Vulnerable?

Movies Have Been Doing So Much Of The Same Thing - In Slightly Different Ways - For So Long That Few Of The Possibilities Of This Great Hybrid Art Have Yet Been Explored.

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.

The Romance Of Movies Is Not Just In Those Stories And Those People On The Screen But In The Adolescent Dream Of Meeting Others Who Feel As You Do About What You’ve Seen.