Hat tip to Stephanie Zacharek (Village Voice) for the perfect use of that popular critical flourish, the reapplication of a movie quote as auto-criticism of the film, in her review of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby.
It’s been too long since I’ve blogged any great critical lines that made me wish I had written them, but I couldn’t resist the opening line of J. R. Jones’s review of Prometheus — arguably the best possible opening sentence in a Prometheus review…
Good grief. Salon.com critic Andrew O’Hehir, who wound up in a blogging skirmish with Roger Ebert after blasting Secretariat as a “honey-dipped fantasy vision of the American past as the Tea Party would like to imagine it,” is at it again.
Here is Roger Ebert on Final Destination 5. His final sentence is classic.
It’s not often that I encounter a Line I Wish I Had Written right in the headline of a review, but here’s a case in point.
Major props to Dr. David C. Downing, whose essay on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Ignatius Insight) closes with this brilliant line:
Arts & Faith veteran “mrmando” skewers Ron Howard’s version of the Dan Brown potboiler with a brilliant angle I hadn’t thought of.
Okay, so this is like, what, the third shout-out in as many weeks to reader Victor, but his combox quip in my NCRegister.com review of Eat Pray Love deserves the widest possible audience.
Okay, that’s not literally true, because in order to write a line about Sex and the City 2 I would have had to screen the film, and it’s hard to imagine anything being worth that, especially in the same week as Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Agora. I’m not sure my soul wouldn’t implode.
Could Thomas Balmes’ Babies, now playing in barely-limited release around the country, be the year’s most important movie? Jeffrey Overstreet thinks it just might, and while I’ve already excerpted the lines below explaining why in a previous blog post, his comments are worth a dedicated blog post.
Quoting generously from my longish Robin Hood review, Carl Olsen of Ignatius Insight Scoop adds:
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