A critic often has to play the role of coroner, dissecting a work to find out why it died (or never lived).

The movie is a metaphor for the power of delusional hype--a metaphor for itself.

I'm more encouraged by the saplings: new music groups, tiny new venues, entrepreneurial musician-composers who aren't waiting to be discovered but are instead building their own Establishment.

Let me tell you, if your marriage is in trouble, skip the therapist and find a psycho. Nothing brings people together faster.

The English have a wellspring of comedy that will never be exhausted: the combination of bestial urges and excellent manners.

Despite some standout events, 2012 was demoralizing. The Met felt adrift, and New York City Opera couldn't claw its way back to artistic health.

Russell Crowe is normally an actor who disappears so far into his characters you'd swear his DNA has been altered.

It's easy to say "This year in art sucked." After all, about 85 percent of all shows of contemporary art are bad. But 85 percent of all art made in the Renaissance was bad.

Some reviewed 'The Master' on their knees, and while I respected its distinctive discordancy - can a movie be at once feverish and glacial? - I was unmoved.

The movie's only serious criticism is reserved for Baker's television network, which doesn't think Americans care about Afghanistan - kind of hypocritical given this film's lack of substance.

I have a female colleague who gets annoyed that Tina Fey seems to go out of her way in her movies to deride her looks, as if she weren't such an attractive woman.

Don’t be too nice to him, ” I teased. “He’ll never leave.

Make a concise statement clearly and you should only need to say it once.

You have been trapped in the inescapable net of ruin by your own want of sense.

Every once in a while, you let a word or phrase out and you want to catch it and bring it back. You can't do that. It's gone, gone forever.

In order to look special wearing the chancy unique; it must be worn with your persona, and if the two don't blend, then the look becomes pear-shaped.

If you're going to be alive and on this planet, you have to, like, suck the marrow out of every day and get the most out of it.

Jerry Goldsmith is the #1 composer working now. He's open to new ideas and always inventing.

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.

The problem of making the inner meet the outer of today is, of course, the function of the artist.

The economic illusion is the belief that social justice is bad for economic growth.