"Part of the widespread anticipation of Apocalypse Now was our readiness for a visionary, climactic, summing-up movie. Coppola must have felt that too, but he couldn't supply it. He got tied up in a knot of American self-hatred and guilt, and what the picture boiled down to was: White man_he devil. Since then, I think, people have expected less of movies and have been willing to settle for less. Some have even been willing to settle for Kramer vs. Kramer".


"The Deer Hunter is a romantic adolescent boy's view of friendship, with the Vietnam War perceived in Victorian terms as a test of men's courage."
"It's part of the narrowness of the film's vision that there is no suggestion that there ever was a sense of community among the Vietnamese which was disrupted. We are introduced to Asians by seeing a Vietcong soldier open the door of a shelter, find women and children cowering inside, and then thoughtfully lob in a grenade. The movie leaves the impression that if we did some bad things we did them ruthlessly but impersonally; the Vietcong were cruel and sadistic. Americans had no choice, but the V.C. enjoyed it. Everything that happens appears to be the result of Viet Cong atrocities."
"Cimino is like Coppola without brains or sensibility."


"We can surmise that Oliver Stone became a grunt in Vietnam to "become a man" and to become a writer. As Platoon, a coming-of-age film demonstrates, he went through the rite of passage, but, as Platoon also demonstrates, he became a very bad writer_a hype artist. Actually, he had already proven this with his crude scripts for Midnight Express and Scarface."
"When he doesn't destroy things with the voice-over banalities or a square line of dialogue, he may do it with a florid gesture".
"Stone's moviemaking suggests that he was a romantic loner who sought his manhood in the excitement of violent fantasy. Stone seems to want to get high on war, like Barnes".


"Born on the 4th of July appears to be a pacifist movie, an indictment of all war. You can't be sure, because there's never a sequence where Ron figures out the war is wrong. The morality of taking up arms isn't really what the movie is about anyway. The audience is carried along by Tom Cruise's Ronnie yelling that his penis will never be hard again."
"I don't think I've ever seen an epic about a bad loser".


"Some movies_Grand Illusion and Shoeshine come to mind, can affect us in more direct, emotional ways than simple entertainment movies. They have more imagination, more poetry, more intensity than the usual fare; they have large themes and a vision. They can leave us feeling simultaneously elated and wiped out. Overwhelmed, we may experience a helpless anger if we hear people mock them or poke holes in them in order to dismiss them. Casualties of War has this kind of purity."