The Great Movies Quotes

“Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people.”
― Roger Ebert, The Great Movies

“As a child I simply did not notice whether a movie was in color or not. The movies themselves were such an overwhelming mystery that if they wanted to be in black and white, that was their business.”
― Roger Ebert, The Great Movies

“Films are no longer concerned with the silence of God, but with the chattering of men.”
― Roger Ebert, The Great Movies

“2001: A Space Odyssey is not about a goal, but about a quest, a need.”
― Roger Ebert, The Great Movies

“People trying to be funny are never as funny as people trying to be serious and failing.”
― Roger Ebert, The Great Movies

“As we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do, after all, amount to more than a hill of beans.”
― Roger Ebert, The Great Movies

“The ability of an audience to enter into the narrative arc of a movie is being lost; do today’s audiences have the patience to wait for Harry Lime in The Third Man?”
― Roger Ebert, The Great Movies

“The movie teaches us how action is the enemy of suspense—how action releases tension instead of building it. Better to wait for a whole movie for something to happen (assuming we really care whether it happens) than to sit through a film where things we don’t care about are happening constantly.”
― Roger Ebert, The Great Movies

“sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it. François Truffaut said that for a director it was an inspiring sight to walk to the front of a movie theater, turn around, and look back at the faces of the audience, turned up to the light from the screen. If the film is any good, those faces reflect an out-of-the-body experience: The audience for a brief time is somewhere else, sometime else, concerned with lives that are not its own. Of all the arts, movies are”
― Roger Ebert, The Great Movies

“It is a truism that Hollywood trailers advertise not the movie that has been made, but the movie that the studio wishes had been made.”
― Roger Ebert, The Great Movies

“It is commonplace to say that silent films are more “dreamlike,” but what does that mean? In Nosferatu, it means that the characters are confronted with alarming images and denied the freedom to talk them away. There is no repartee in nightmares. Human speech dissipates the shadows and makes a room seem normal. Those things that live only at night do not need to talk, for their victims are asleep, waiting.”
― Roger Ebert, The Great Movies

“Murnau now inserts scenes with little direct connection to the story, except symbolically. One involves a scientist who gives a lecture on the Venus flytrap, the “vampire of the vegetable kingdom.” Then Knock, in a jail cell, watches in close-up as a spider devours its prey. Why cannot man likewise be a vampire? Knock senses his Master has arrived, escapes, and scurries about the town with a coffin on his back. As fear of the plague spreads, “the town was looking for a scapegoat,” the titles say, and Knock creeps about on rooftops and is stoned, while the street is filled with dark processions of the coffins of the newly dead. Ellen Hutter learns that the only way to stop a vampire is for a good woman to distract him so that he stays out past the first cock’s crow. Her sacrifice not only saves the city but also reminds us of the buried sexuality in the Dracula story. Bram Stoker wrote with ironclad nineteenth-century Victorian values, inspiring no end of analysis from readers who wonder if the buried message of Dracula might be that unlicensed sex is dangerous to society. The Victorians feared venereal disease the way we fear AIDS, and vampirism may be a metaphor: The predator vampire lives without a mate, stalking his victims or seducing them with promises of bliss—like a rapist or a pickup artist. The cure for vampirism is obviously not a stake through the heart, but nuclear families and bourgeois values. Is Murnau’s Nosferatu scary in the modern sense? Not for me. I admire it more for its artistry and ideas, its atmosphere and images, than for its ability to manipulate my emotions like a skillful modern horror film. It knows none of the later tricks of the trade, like sudden threats that pop in from the side of the screen. But Nosferatu remains effective: It doesn’t scare us, but it haunts us. It shows not that vampires can jump out of shadows, but that evil can grow there, nourished on death. In a sense, Murnau’s film is about all of the things we worry about at three in the morning—cancer, war, disease, madness. It suggests these dark fears in the very style of its visuals. Much of the film is shot in shadow. The corners of the screen are used more than is ordinary; characters lurk or cower there, and it’s a rule of composition that tension is created when the subject of a shot is removed from the center of the frame. Murnau’s special effects add to the disquieting atmosphere: the fast motion of Orlok’s servant,”
― Roger Ebert, The Great Movies

“Alex North,”
― Roger Ebert, The Great Movies