Quotes

[on Basic (2003)] There are no words to describe how deeply stupid and ridiculous this film is.

[on Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)] But in the end, this film is about what all westerns are about, and perhaps all history: the brutal grab for land, resources and power. (...) This cattleman-plutocrat is William Hale, played by Robert De Niro, a man of calcified resentment and self-importance who preens himself on his good relations with the Osage people. (...) Hale's rule, so avowedly caring and sensitive to the Osage, is in fact creating a vast dysfunction of depression, alcoholism, lawlessness, fatal illness and murder. (...) This is an utterly absorbing film, a story that Martin Scorsese sees as a secret history of American power, a hidden violence epidemic polluting the water table of humanity. [The Guardian, May 2023]

[on The Passenger (1975)] A classic of a difficult and alienating kind, but one that really does shimmer in the mind like a remembered dream.

The Vatican is supposed to have induced Galileo to renounce his subversive views about the Earth going round the sun by showing him the instruments of torture. They could have got him to say that the Earth is cubic or banana-shaped just by holding up a DVD copy of Little Man (2006).