Wesley Morris Quotes

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.

‘The Tree of Life’ is a collection of conversations that lost souls and true believers have with themselves while keeping their heads to the sky. But the movie is church via the planetarium.

The enormous success of 2009’s ‘The Blind Side,’ in which Sandra Bullock makes a black teenager one of the family, demonstrates that America isn’t post-racial. It is thoroughly mired in race – the myths that surround it, the guilt it inspires, the discomfort it causes, the struggle to transcend it.

‘The Dictator’ lands somewhere between wan Mel Brooks and good Adam Sandler, whose ‘You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,’ about an Israeli Special Forces soldier at a hair salon, manages to strike better contrasts with vaguely similar culture differences – it’s a nuttier movie, too.

The bravery of Stanley Kramer’s ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’ amounted to two Hollywood legends – Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy – telling the world that a black son-in-law is something they can live with, and so should you, especially if he looks like Sidney Poitier and has degrees.

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.