107 Quotes by Wesley Morris

Sometimes a movie knows you’re watching it. It knows how to hold and keep you, how, when it’s over, to make you want it all over again.

I like Nora Ephron. She wasn’t a critic in the strictest sense of the word, but she did a lot of social criticism. She was so funny and so in the right place at the right time.

All critics have the responsibility to tease out the social ideas and social problems in a movie. I don’t feel an obligation to do that because I’m black.

Straight white males: that’s the predominant moviegoing category, and the persistence of that is a dismaying maintenance of the status quo.

I just have to be able to follow and enjoy the writer’s voice and the writer’s point of view. Liking what the person has to say is not really important to me.

In movies, there are some things the French do that Americans are increasingly incapable of doing. One is honoring the complexities of youth. It’s a quiet, difficult undertaking, requiring subtlety in a filmmaker and perception and patience from us.

I’m a human who is aware of the history of humanity and the ways in which the movies touch on those things.

There comes a point in your moviegoing life where you look at the screen and then you look at the world and you ask, ‘What is going on?’ You want the movies to show you the chaos and mess and risk and failure that are normal for a lot of us. Generally, the movies hide all of that.

Sidney Lumet’s chief preoccupation wasn’t art. It was right and wrong in the American city, nearly always in New York.