Kenneth Turan Quotations

With no plot, character or dialogue worth experiencing, let alone remembering, the film merely occupies space on the screen and hopes for the best,

This really has a very good feeling about it. It really seems like it's going to be an involving film, really, about the nature of writing, the nature of observation, the nature of non-fiction.

So, I think if you don't care about the new 'King Kong,' you're not a movie fan.

He credits a watching of 'King Kong' on TV when he was a kid with making him a film director,

I think this film makes news casting really exciting. It's a film that really holds you because it's an enormous dramatic conflict.

People who make films are always looking for a hook. They're always looking for something that will attract an audience's attention, that will make a person say, 'I want to see that film,' and a book is a proven commodity.

It feels adventurous a little bit for a Hollywood film, even in this day and age. Given that it won in Venice, and the pedigree of everyone involved, that it could be quite good.

This year, I think the studios have outdone themselves. They've really packaged a lot of good stuff at the end of the year.

A treasure beyond price for fans of both the classic Hammett novel and the three (that's right, three) film versions of the doomed quest for a black bird. An incredible amalgam of photos, memos, letters, reviews, whatever, this will make fans of the book or the film gasp as one unexpected delight succeeds another. With this book, wonders really do never cease.

This film for sure will get an Oscar nomination for Paltrow. It might even win it for her again. This is a very intensely dramatic film. It's a really agonizing role.

There is stuff at which your jaw just drops, and yet they were hugely popular, ... It's an interesting corner of film history.

A book does not make bad jokes, drink too much or eat more than you can afford to pay for.

It's a tradition to save the good films for the fall and the holiday season, ... Never Coming To A Theater Near You.

It's not just that we see bad films, but bad films of a type we've seen so many times before,

It's not a new thing, ... One of the biggest successes ever in film, 'Gone With the Wind,' came from a very big best-selling book.

It's great to see talented people have success,

It's really a remarkable film. You really feel the pain, the agony, the unintentional humor. It's the kind of young, independent film making we should be seeing more of.

A TREAT. FASCINATING. Director Lipes is a classic cinéma vérité practitioner in the mold of Albert Maysles and Frederick Wiseman.

Things get better when Joy hears about a televised way to sell products and makes a connection with QVC. She convinces an executive there, played by Bradley Cooper, to let her appear as herself.

Silence is not the absence of sound. It's a physical place, a destination with value and meaning in a chaotic world, somewhere arrived at with difficulty and left with regret.

Death is supposed to be the great equalizer, but that's never true. Death is random, capricious, unconcerned, a flagrant player of favorites. It keeps its own counsel, so much the better to profoundly shock by its actions.

What audiences end up with word-wise is a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romances, a movie that reeks of phoniness and lacks even minimal originality.

"Joy" is based, albeit loosely, on the life of Joy Mangano, an entrepreneur, inventor and QVC shopping network star with the mega-selling Miracle Mop. Jennifer Lawrence is excellent as Joy, but the film starts off on the wrong foot with woeful depictions of her background as the only sane person in her dysfunctional family.

What's most troubling about this witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone-crunching violence is the increasing realization that it actually thinks it's saying something of significance.

Baseball endures at least in part because it is a contemplative sport that delights in nuances. Not a brazen game, eager to sell its thrills cheaply, but rather an understated affair that must be courted if its to be loved.

Audiences looking for a rich, textured, cinematic experience will be put off and disconcerted by an image that looks more like an advanced version of high definition television than a traditional movie.

You can't be a movie fan and not be excited about the prospect of this 'King Kong,'

The 'Harry Potter' films are as close to a sure thing as there really exists in Hollywood now. There is a built-in audience for these films.

The director is Rob Marshall, who directed 'Chicago.' It looks to be a very beautiful film.