David Edelstein Quotes
I'm more encouraged by the saplings: new music groups, tiny new venues, entrepreneurial musician-composers who aren't waiting to be discovered but are instead building their own Establishment.
A critic often has to play the role of coroner, dissecting a work to find out why it died (or never lived).
Let me tell you, if your marriage is in trouble, skip the therapist and find a psycho. Nothing brings people together faster.
The English have a wellspring of comedy that will never be exhausted: the combination of bestial urges and excellent manners.
Despite some standout events, 2012 was demoralizing. The Met felt adrift, and New York City Opera couldn't claw its way back to artistic health.
Russell Crowe is normally an actor who disappears so far into his characters you'd swear his DNA has been altered.
It's easy to say "This year in art sucked." After all, about 85 percent of all shows of contemporary art are bad. But 85 percent of all art made in the Renaissance was bad.
Some reviewed 'The Master' on their knees, and while I respected its distinctive discordancy - can a movie be at once feverish and glacial? - I was unmoved.
The movie's only serious criticism is reserved for Baker's television network, which doesn't think Americans care about Afghanistan - kind of hypocritical given this film's lack of substance.
I have a female colleague who gets annoyed that Tina Fey seems to go out of her way in her movies to deride her looks, as if she weren't such an attractive woman.
Still, you can't complain about the number of movies being made. Never have the means of making movies been so accessible to so many. The problem is getting bodies into seats.
Every year, I'm depressed that so few of the documentaries I've loved break through.
The economic and technological changes are real, but I just can't bring myself to wax apocalyptic about the future of books.
I'd put the most money on Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson - and not just because we'll probably still be waiting for the final volume in 2017.