Richard Corliss Quotes

I don't think 'Cocktail' was a perfect critical success, but it touched a vein in our culture.

As films are a mass medium, if more people love your work, it is better.

In films, you will be judged by your last hit or, let's say, your last film.

A successful film is a good film, and a non-successful film is a bad film. It's as simple as that.

'West' is one of those scripts that, when it came out, everyone wanted a piece of it and everyone wanted to be involved in it.

We're going to see a very, very commercial kind of picture-making.

The funny thing is that people see one film like 'Racing Stripes' or 'Ice Princess' and all of a sudden, slip me into this category of 'that's what she's always involved in.'

Everybody loves a hit. There is nothing as fun as making a cultural splash with a movie.

Once you make a movie like 'Superbad,' when it's popular and you're the lead, you get offered all kinds of things and there's a temptation to make bad movies either for the money or to maintain your relevance in pop culture.

We don't make movies for critics. I've done four movies; there's millions upon millions upon millions of people who've paid to see them. Somebody likes them. My greatest joy is to sit anonymously in a dark theater and watch it with an audience, a paying audience.

I don't want to be an art-house movie guy, where people who go to film school can discuss your work, but people who haven't studied cinema can't appreciate it. By the same token, I don't want to be the guy who's making this commercial pap that people lap up but that disappears the minute you leave the theater.

I don't believe that you can judge the worth of a movie in the atmosphere in which it comes out the first time. There's just so many reasons why some pictures don't catch on.

A lot of times, we're just sold these movies that are really cynically conceived and marketed, and they just want you there opening weekend, before everybody finds out it's not so good.

A film cannot make it into the culture without the support of critics.

Every actor's deepest desire is to reach a huge audience. So, I don't look down upon commercial cinema... there's a beauty in it that you understand sooner or later.

I made three movies in 1995 and I was unhappy with all of them: Sleepers, Incognito, and Speed 2.

Hollywood is tied hand and foot to the demands for artificiality of the masses all over the world.

It's the formulaic studio movies the make money, and when they do, the actors in them are automatically movie stars.

I've never had a movie that got great reviews. I've had movies that got different levels of good and bad reviews, but you can more or less count on plenty of bad reviews.

The so-called intellectuals don't like my films.

Today it's not culture; it's box office.

I'm a film buff and I was keen to find out about the response to Daniel Craig's 007. 'Empire' and 'Hot Dog' had great reviews, and finally he's been accepted as the new Bond. So many millions go into that franchise that if you make a mistake, it's awful.

I don't think of it as a competition - which might surprise you, given the way movies are reported constantly.

Entertainment and escapism - those are the bigger money-making films today.

'The Book of Love' is the kind of James L. Brooks mainstream movie that the majors are ignoring.