If There Is Any Test That Can

Citizen Kane Is Perhaps The One American Talking Picture That Seems As Fresh Now As The Day It Opened. It May Seem Even Fresher.

In The Sixties, The Recycling Of Pop Culture Turning It Into Pop Art And Camp Had Its Own Satirical Zest. Now We're Into A Different Kind Of Recycling. Moviemakers Give Movies Of The Past An Authority That Those Movies Didn't Have; They Inflate Images That May Never Have Compelled Belief, Images That Were No More Than Shorthand Gestures And They Use Them Not As Larger-than-life Jokes But As Altars.

All Our Advertising Is Propaganda, Of Course, But It Has Become So Much A Part Of Our Life, Is So Pervasive, That We Just Don't Know What It Is Propaganda For.

Movies Are A Combination Of Art And Mass Medium, But Television Is So Single In Its Purpose-selling-that It Operates Without That Painful, Poignant Mixture Of Aspiration And Effort And Compromise.

A Good Movie Can Take You Out Of Your Dull Funk And The Hopelessness That So Often Goes With Slipping Into A Theatre; A Good Movie Can Make You Feel Alive Again, In Contact, Not Just Lost In Another City. Good Movies Make You Care, Make You Believe In Possibilities Again.