Words matter. These are the best Richard Corliss Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
You may debate whether the Disney heroines fit the feminist standard, but they don’t live in a democracy. Remember, they’re princesses.
The movie truism is that stars play themselves, while actors play other people – troubled or toxic, and memorably strange. By that definition, Philip Seymour Hoffman, who disappeared into the rabbit hole of his characters’ souls, was our generation’s anti-star and the chameleonic film actor of his age.
A home movie of a fictional home life, an epic assembled from vignettes, ‘Boyhood’ shimmers with unforced reality. It shows how an ordinary life can be reflected in an extraordinary movie.
Texting has reduced the number of waste words, but it has also exposed a black hole of ignorance about traditional – what a cranky guy would call correct – grammar.
Musical chairs or Russian roulette? Sometimes there’s as much tense drama in the casting of a Hollywood movie as there is in the finished product.
Football’s a war game without fatal casualties; baseball is a picnic on a huge field, without the food.
‘TIME’s spell-check always admonishes me whenever I compose a sentence in the passive voice, a warning that is often ignored by me.
One of the occupational hazards of reviewing year-end biopics with Oscar ambitions is pointing out discrepancies between the real subjects and their on-screen avatars.
‘Under the Skin’ is handsome, in a dour way, but inert – a cunning experiment that died in the shooting or on the editing table. You’ll want to get the DVD, though, and not just for its study of Scarlett. Odds are that the Making-Of documentary will be far stranger and more fascinating than the movie that was made.
‘Interstellar’ may never equal the blast of scientific speculation and cinematic revelation that was Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ but its un-Earthly vistas are spectral and spectacular.
From her first superheroine role in ‘Lara Croft: Tomb Raider’ – which earned $275 million globally in 2001, back when that was real money – Jolie has been the one actress who can stand up to any male star and stare him down.
If the Beatles made England swing for the young, then Bond was a travel-poster boy for the earmuff brigade. The Bond films even put a few theme songs, such as Paul McCartney’s ‘Live and Let Die,’ on the pop charts.
Ask Bond-watchers of a certain age about the six actors who have slipped into Bond’s Savile Row suits in the Broccoli franchise, and they might say it’s really Connery and five other guys – since he, being first and being Sean, stamped the role with his sulfurous masculinity.
A movie like ‘Transcendence’ may be pertinent in its political reverberations of all computer data held in a cloud and monitored by the NSA, but it also rails against the tools its makers so artfully employ.
If you were a kid in the 1950s, and you got nightmares from a story in a horror comic book, you have Al Feldstein to blame. If you were a kid in the ’60s or ’70s, giggling at ‘MAD’s prankster wit, you have Feldstein to thank.
Before sequels became the most reliable way to make a buck, Bond set the standard for lavish serial adventures. Before Hollywood found gold in multimillion-dollar adaptations of comic-book characters – in the Superman, Batman and Spider-Man blockbusters – Bond was the movies’ first big-budget franchise superhero.
In his musicals with Garland, Rooney was the sparkplug for prodigious entrepreneurship – that era’s predecessor of the garage band, but with Gershwin tunes and an all-star cast.
Icy and earthy, Helen Mirren is a rare, regal presence in a movie age that values the plebeian over the patrician and mass over class. Lauded with an Oscar and an Emmy for playing both Queen Elizabeths, Mirren has matched her cool aristocracy with a boldness of performance and display.
Though not really a comedy, ‘Rosewater’ is a demonstration of the creed behind ‘The Daily Show’: belief in the crucial need for impious wit against entrenched power. The freedom of the press is also the freedom to depress – and to inspire. That’s a message that can outlive any Oscar season.
In film schools of the future, professors will teach ‘Tammy’ as an object lesson in Making Everything Go Wrong.
Every artist undresses his subject, whether human or still life. It is his business to find essences in surfaces, and what more attractive and challenging surface than the skin around a soul?
‘Chef’ is a dish of arroz con pollo served with a smile but not much style. The critic in the film would give it a low grade, for agreeability without ambition.
Innocent parents might have thought that a musical cartoon version of a fairy tale would be a child’s ideal introduction to movie magic. Yet Walt Disney taught moral lessons in the most useful way: by scaring the poop out of the little ones.
Casey Kasem not only played the music of the stars, he also reached the sunniest-sounding celebrity on his very own. Listening to him on the radio, you could hear America smiling.
‘Tammy,’ the new movie starring, produced, and co-written by Melissa McCarthy, could be an artifact from some alternate universe: the creatures there resemble Earthlings but have an entirely different and debased idea of what’s funny.
In some ways, ‘The Little Mermaid’ was old-fashioned. Rendered in the hand-drawn style, it was the last Disney animated feature to use cels and Xeroxing. Pixar and its CGI imitators soon made that rigorous process obsolete.
It’s nice that established and emerging stars agree to appear in ambitious low-budget films. Such pro-bono work gives the movie a higher profile and the actors a potentially more distinguished resume.
Famous for his ‘Maverick’ Western series in the 1950s and ‘The Rockford Files’ in the ’70s, and in movies like ‘The Great Escape’ and ‘Grand Prix’ in between, James Garner played amiable, independent characters for more than a half-century and never lost his comforting, enduring appeal.
I came of baseball age (isn’t it always around first grade?) in the last sputtering years of the A’s Philadelphia tenancy. I probably plighted my fated troth in 1949, when the A’s fluked into a winning season and introduced a pintsize southpaw named Bobby Shantz.
How many mothers have emerged from a family trip to a Disney movie and been obliged to explain the facts of death to their sobbing young? A conservative estimate: the tens of millions, since the studio’s first animated feature, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ premiered in 1937.
To transport picturegoers to a unique place in the glare of the earth, in the darkness of the heart – this, you realize with a gasp of joy, is what movies can do.
Fess up, ‘Hunger Games’ fans: Does anyone care about Peeta or find him attractive? He’s the Ron Weasley of the series: he gets points for callow valor and sympathy for his run of bad luck, but he remains a pasty, earnest bore.
Although the Academy prefers their Best Pictures grounded in realism, not fantasy, Lee’s ‘Life of Pi’ win proved that the voters understand and appreciate the qualities a visionary director needs to create an otherworldly adventure.
The lumpiness of ‘The Good Lie’s progression – from infancy to adulthood, and from ethnic horror to gentle social comedy to a heroic gift of freedom – proclaims the film’s respect for facts and truths that can’t be squeezed into a smooth narrative.
‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,’ while not nearly the masterpiece proclaimed by many critics, is certainly a fascinating cross-species: a big-budget summer action fantasy with a sylvan, indie-film vibe, and a war movie that dares ask its audience to root for the peacemakers.
You know the fairy-tale drill, especially from the Disney versions: the heroines endure awful stuff in rites of passage that lead to a joyous resolution of, usually, marriage to a prince. ‘Into the Woods’ follows that template, then asks, ‘What happens after Happy Ever After?’
‘Blade Runner’ was one of several dystopian science-fiction films to tank in the early and middle ’80s. ‘Tron,’ ‘The Dark Crystal,’ ‘The Keep,’ ‘Labyrinth’: none found a large audience.
In the greed-is-good tradition of the ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Twilight’ movie franchises, the overseers of ‘The Hunger Games’ have split the last book into two films.
After two terms as California’s Governator, Schwarzenegger slipped comfortably back into pictures with ‘The Last Stand,’ a modern Western, then crammed into the wide screen, as if it were a service elevator, with fellow ’80s muscle car Sylvester Stallone in ‘Escape Plan.’
‘The Birth of a Nation’ occupies a view of the South not far from Scarlett O’Hara’s in ‘Gone With the Wind,’ and modern audiences have to wrestle with that beloved movie’s romanticizing of racism.
On ‘American Top 40’ the Kasem voice soared and swooped, like an expert aural acrobat, through promos, jingles and dedications, usually rising to a dramatic peak for the top-selling song of the week.
Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space.
It is said that no star is a heroine to her makeup artist.
Like ‘God’s Not Dead,’ the fundamentalist Christian movie that has become a popular hit, ‘Transcendence’ is essentially a dramatized debate. And as ‘God’s Not Dead’ stacks the rhetorical cards for the Deity’s existence, the Pfister film eventually hangs back with the Luddites.
