"The bigger question to ask about 300 is why, for a supposedly rousing tale of heroism, it's so curiously unaffecting."

“Who would have thought that Cameron Crowe had a movie as bad as Vanilla Sky in him? It's a punishing picture, a betrayal of everything that Crowe has proved he knows how to do right.”

“Women's desire is a mysterious, feral thing, and if you think you've got it figured out because you've looked at a few Georgia O'Keeffe paintings, you're not even close.”

“Nolan ... gives us enough multilayered subplots to at least fool us into thinking this is a work of intellectual and moral complexity. But as a piece of visual storytelling, from shot to shot, The Dark Knight is a mess. Characters disappear from one locale and show up inexplicably in another, thanks to the magic of editing. At one point, we learn two characters have been abducted, but Nolan doesn't bother to show us who did it or how. At the end, a major character is left hanging, literally, as we are figuratively. If this is genius, give me hackery.”

“Batman Begins leaks existential phoniness from the first frame.”

“You can talk film theory till you're blue in the face, but in the end, the thing that may haunt you most about a movie is a pair of eyes.”

“Extravagant in movie terms but stingy in emotional ones, it embodies all of Spielberg's bad impulses and almost none of his good ones: It's a grand display of how well he knows how to work us over, and yet the desperation with which he tries to get to us is repulsive.”