Stephanie Zacharek quotes

Children of Men is a solemn, haunting picture, but it's also a thrilling one, partly because of the sheer bravado with which it's made. It left me feeling more fortified than drained. [Director Alfonso] Cuarón, the most openhearted of directors, prefers to give rather than take away. (Stephanie Zacharek)
While 9 Songs is sexually explicit in the basic sense, its directness is what's most fascinating, and ultimately most moving, about it. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
Who would have thought that [director] 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. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
The bigger question to ask about 300 is why, for a supposedly rousing tale of heroism, it's so curiously unaffecting. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
We've moved away from being a culture of people who think about movies to one made up of people who believe that spouting a list of preferences is the same as registering an opinion. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
It's impossible to tell what's going on at any given moment in Tomb of the Dragon Emperor; it's even harder to care about being able to tell. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
Batman Begins leaks existential phoniness from the first frame. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
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. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
I can't remember ever feeling so glad that a movie was finally over. [Director George] Lucas may have held my imagination hostage for two hours, but reclaiming it afterward wasn't hard at all. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
Monster is a compassionate picture without any obvious agenda. And it's effective precisely because it's not a polemic. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
Oldboy makes us feel a part of something bigger than ourselves. It's a grand, gritty, indelible experience, the sort of picture that mimics great literature in the way it envelops you in a well-told story while also evoking subtle but strong gradations of emotion. (Stephanie Zacharek)
Pan's Labyrinth works on so many levels that it seems to change shape even as you watch it. It is, at times, a joyless picture, and its pall of sadness can begin to weigh you down. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
The scariest thing in it may be the way the clock radio has a way of turning itself on, loudly, of its own accord. The song is always the Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun." Now that's horror. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
There are epic impulses everywhere you look in There Will Be Blood; what's missing is character development, focused storytelling and, most significantly (apart from that terrific opening sequence), any sense of raw, intuitive drama. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
This isn't a picture filled with wonder and a sense of fun; it's so jaded and crass that I almost wonder if it's a highly unscientific experiment designed to gauge how little audiences will settle for these days. Manic and multicolored, Speed Racer is an excess of nothingness. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
It's time to start recognizing that not all escapist entertainment is created equal. And that some of it isn't even entertainment. Miss March is, to use the vernacular of the escapist moviegoer, the biggest pile of crap I've seen in ages. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
It's guilty of the very thing that makes kids hate history as a subject when it's taught badly: The Da Vinci Code makes the past feel like a dull, grainy, faraway thing, instead of something vibrant and alive. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
This film "Phantom" takes everything that's wrong with Broadway and puts it on the big screen in a gaudy splat. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
This is a sturdy little cop thriller, and even when it stretches the bounds of plausibility, you go with it, partly because you believe -- almost against your better judgment -- in what the characters are doing. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
It would be destined for the trash heap of Shakespeare adaptations, if not for its female lead, and its heart, 17-year-old Claire Danes. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
Extravagant in movie terms but stingy in emotional ones, it embodies all of [director Steven] 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. (Stephanie Zacharek)
This sprawling epic is as lively as a natural history museum diorama. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
It's mournful and troubling in a way that goes beyond ordinary movie manipulation. It burns clean. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
[Director James] Cameron manhandles the real story, scavenging it for his own puny narrative purposes. It's a film made with boorish confidence and zero sensitivity, big and dumb and hulking. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek
I suspect this picture is pretty close to what fans were hoping for, and for their sake, I'm glad it's markedly better than the two that preceded it. But Revenge of the Sith is still crap. View quote
Stephanie Zacharek