The following come from reviews and articles by A.O. Scott in The New York Times.
"One recent afternoon I was sitting at my computer studying old clips of
Gene [Siskel] and Roger [Ebert]. After a while my daughter sat down next to me. We
watched in silence for a while, and then she said: 'These guys are
always fighting. Even when they both like a movie, they have to fight
about why it's good.' That may not be an exhaustive definition of
criticism as a discipline or a mode of thought, but it strikes me as a
pretty good summary." —April 13, 2008
"On Christmas, my annual busman’s holiday, I took my daughter to see Enchanted,
a just-right movie for her if ever there was one. Its blend of satire
and sweetness, princessy romance and feminist pluck was expertly
calibrated to satisfy a third-grade girl. Which was just the problem.
At the end, as is my custom (I have to get my insights from somewhere),
I asked her what she thought. 'It was good,' she said. 'But I felt like
I knew what was going to happen the whole time.'" —Jan. 11, 2008
"Shrek the Third, directed by Chris Miller and Raman Hui from a script
with a half-dozen credited begetters, already feels less like a
children's movie than either of its predecessors. (This may be why I
liked it better than the others. But then again, so did my kids.)" —May 18, 2007
"For the last six months or so, in the guise of a civilian moviegoer, I
have been conducting (with the sometimes unwitting assistance of my
wife) a cautious, intermittent experiment. Ignoring the advice of the Motion Picture Association of America
and the studio marketing departments about what my children, who are 10
and 7, should see, I have taken them to revival houses and museums as
well as to multiplexes; to musicals and subtitled films as well as to
risqué action blockbusters and not-too-explicit love stories." —Jan. 5, 2007
"The title of
Steve Anderson's rowdy and contentious new documentary … consists
of a single, highly versatile English word. I have been known to use
the word in mixed company and even, I blush to admit, around my
children — but only pedagogically, to call attention to the laxity of
other drivers on family car trips." —Nov. 10, 2006
"The only time my 6-year-old daughter has been driven from a movie in terror was by The Brothers Grimm
last summer, when she could not stand the sight of a child being eaten
by a horse. But just a few weeks earlier she had been completely
unfazed by the beastly punishments visited on the nasty children in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Nor was she unduly shaken by the death of a boy in The River,
Jean Renoir's leisurely 1951 masterpiece, which she saw on DVD and
promptly proclaimed her second-favorite movie of all time, after Charlie." —Dec. 16, 2005
"It is a world I have been longing to revisit ever since my children wore out the tapes of A Close Shave (formerly known in our house as 'the one with the mean dog'), The Wrong Trousers ('the one with the mean bird') and A Grand Day Out
('the one when they go to the moon'). I was a bit worried that more
superficially sophisticated pleasures — Lizzie Maguire or whatever
tweener sitcoms the kids are into these days — had eroded the appeal of
Wallace and Gromit, but I need not have. We all had a marvelous time." —Oct. 5, 2005
"One thing I will say about the 2005 edition of New Directors: I haven't
seen so many pregnant women since the last time I accompanied my wife
to a natural childbirth class." —March 29, 2005
"On our way to a screening of Shark Tale, my daughter and I fell into a discussion of Finding Nemo, a movie she has seen several dozen times. The subject came up naturally
enough, since the movie we were about to see, which opens nationwide
today, is DreamWorks's attempt to follow Disney and Pixar into the
lucrative and technologically demanding world of underwater
computer-generated 3-D animation. In anticipation of the novel delights
of Shark Tale, my daughter was happy to revise her earlier high
opinion of Nemo. 'It's about a fish who gets lost,' she said with a
shrug. 'That's not really very interesting.'" —Oct. 1, 2004
"On the way out of the advance screening of Spider-Man 2, which
opens tomorrow nationwide, I asked my son,
who is nearly 8 and whom I
had brought along for some unscientific audience research, what he
thought of the movie. As he usually does, he mentioned the
scary parts and the cool parts, of which there are many. 'But there
was one part,' he said, 'that I really didn't like.' That was when
Peter Parker threw his costume in the trash and declared that he was
'Spider-Man no more.' 'He can't do that,' my son complained. 'It's not
right. We need Spider-Man.'" —June 29, 2004
"As I piled my children into the station wagon for a trip to the movies
last Saturday — it was going to be either Stuart Little 2 or Like Mike — I thought about delivering, for the first time ever, a
standard parental lecture." —Aug. 11, 2002
"In the meantime, according to a press release issued the day after
the Oscar nominations were announced last month, [Jimmy Neutron] will be
busy doing what cartoon heroes do best, namely shilling for Burger
King, the Embassy Suites hotel chain and Ore-Ida. The release announces
that he will serve as the latter's 'spokescharacter for its new Funky
Fries line of flavored and colored French fries.' The flavors and
colors, in case you're wondering, include cinnamon, chocolate and 'kool blue.' Perhaps Jimmy and his friends — or perhaps my
daughter's preschool class — are moonlighting in product R & D
over at Ore-Ida." —March 10, 2002
From Harmony Korine's introduction to the recently published screenplay of his new film, Mister Lonely: 