Richard Corliss

It's a fallacy, long rebuffed by science, that humans use only about 10% of their brainpower ...
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Famous for his 'Maverick' Western series in the 1950s and 'The Rockford Files' in the '70s, ...
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The big gamble in 'Focus' - it's a Will Smith movie that dares to be small.

You may debate whether the Disney heroines fit the feminist standard, but they don't live in ...
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In 'Se7en' and 'Fight Club,' Fincher proved his suave mastery of film violence, in Zodiac, his ...
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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.

A movie like 'Selma' should be a relic in a time capsule from 1965, a clue to how well we heeded King's words and how far we have advanced. Instead, it is a reminder that the 'American problem' has yet to be solved.

Almost any football play, even an off-tackle slant by a running back, offers the balletic beauty of athletic skill and the punishing drama of physical collision.

Africa is the continent that the rest of the world prefers not to think about.

At heart, 'Chef' is a daddy-daycare fable about an overextended man who teaches his 10-year-old son the family business and learns to love him.

Bad movies: they can be tatty classics of crazed ineptitude, like Edward D. Wood's 'Glen or Glenda' and 'Plan 9 from Outer Space,' or big-budget misfires like the 1987 'Ishtar,' a would-be comedy that sent Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman on a Hope-Crosby Road to Dystopia.

'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.

'Birdman' is basically 'All About Eve' - the 1950 comedy about rehearsal rivalries in a Broadway show, and another Best Picture laureate - reimagined as a Batman suicide mission. The movie couldn't be actor-ier.

'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.

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.

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?

'Divergent,' directed by Neil Burger, displayed an admirable seriousness and some grim verve in laying out the boundaries of novelist Veronica Roth's dystopia - six segregated but ostensibly harmonious regions defined by their inhabitants' skills.

'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.

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.

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.

For 82 minutes, 'The Little Mermaid' reclaims the movie house as a dream palace and the big screen as a window into enchantment. Live-action filmmakers, see this and try to top it. Go on and try.

Football's a war game without fatal casualties, baseball is a picnic on a huge field, without the food.

Football has end zones and goal posts, basketball has the hoop, and hockey the goal cage. Baseball is the only game with an imaginary box: the strike zone, which the umpire determines at his own discretion.

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.

For my wife Mary Corliss and me, 'Colbert' has been destination viewing. Even in the early years, we never took the show's excellence for granted, agreeing that someday we'd look back on the double whammy of 'The Daily Show' and 'The Colbert Report' as the golden age of TV's singeing singing satire.

Hollywood was born schizophrenic. For 75 years it has been both a town and a state of mind, an industry and an art form.

Hollywood has always seen Sondheim as a caviar brand unsuitable for a popcorn industry.

Has any movie captured a moment in social, let alone musical, history with as much acuity and joy as 'A Hard Day's Night'?

I first visited the Toronto fest in 1979, its fourth edition, when it was known as the Festival of Festivals and had an audience of about 40,000. I happily returned to the 10-day skein nearly every year thereafter, as attendance swelled to 400,000 and it grew into the most influential film festival in North America, perhaps the world.

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.

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.

I had grown up thinking of movies as something to eat popcorn with. Bergman and the other European directors were the first ones to open my eyes to film as art.

In my experience, copy editors, like the stalwart staff I've worked with and learned from in my 34 years at 'TIME,' are linguistic conservatives - the keepers of the flame ignited by the Strunk-White 'Elements of Style,' published in full in 1957 and chosen by 'TIME' as one of the 100 most influential nonfiction books of the past century.

In film schools of the future, professors will teach 'Tammy' as an object lesson in Making Everything Go Wrong.

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.

In 'Serena,' stuff happens, then nastier stuff, without ever engaging the viewer's rooting interest or sick fear. Sometimes it's a question of sloppiness on the set or in the editing room.

In 'Se7en' and 'Fight Club,' Fincher proved his suave mastery of film violence, in Zodiac, his way of clarifying the many clues in a murder thriller. As he showed in 'The Social Network,' the director also knows that no wound is more toxic than a friend's betrayal.

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.

In 'The Birth of a Nation,' Griffith made audiences see the Civil War through his eyes - the eyes of the son of a colonel in the Army of the Confederacy.

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.

In the movies, every crazy old fart needs a cool old car. Jack Nicholson drove a spiffy yellow 1970 Dodge Challenger two-door in 'The Bucket List.' In 'Gran Torino,' the cranky pensioner played by Clint Eastwood not only owned a 1972 GT Sport, he also used to build cars like that at the Ford plant.

In their plush melodies and plummy platitudes, many Rodgers-and-Hammerstein songs were secular hymns, which so insinuated themselves into the ear of the Eisenhower-era listener that they became the liturgical music for the American mid-century.

It is said that no star is a heroine to her makeup artist.

'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.

It's a fallacy, long rebuffed by science, that humans use only about 10% of their brainpower. But it is true about most summer movies. Pouring their wizardry into special effects and well-choreographed fights, warm-weather action films rarely challenge the viewer with grand notions or beautifully baffling imagery.

Jolie's exotic mixture of brains and glamour makes her the one reliable international star, and one of the few of either gender to make people in every country pay to see her.

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.

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.

Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space.

Lesley Gore's part-time field was pop singer, and in her brief but urgent prime, she was the Queen of Teen Angst. She endured heartbreak as a birthday girl betrayed by her beau in 'It's My Party,' savored revenge in the sequel 'Judy's Turn to Cry' and belted the proto-feminist anthem 'You Don't Own Me.'

Nixon's shifty eyes and perpetual 5 o'clock shadow made him a natural fit for caricatured villainy.

Nixon, with his mellifluous baritone, was a great politician for radio but creepy on TV.

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.

Obamacare notwithstanding, the current president's progressive instincts have been neutered by the rise of the Tea Party and Luddite conservatism.

No question that 'Birdman' is a breathtaking technical achievement, not a stunt. Shot in 30 days after a long rehearsal period, with the actors' and the camera's movements calibrated to the inch and the millisecond so the action flows smoothly, the picture has the jagged energy of a long guerrilla raid choreographed by Bob Fosse.

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.

On the page, 'Gone Girl' was a literary game: a tennis match of alternating chapters from Nick and Amy, with the reader offering to take each character's side every few pages.

Soviet moviegoers gazed enviously on the jalopy that took the Joads from Oklahoma to California. The message Russians took from 'The Grapes of Wrath': even the poorest capitalists have cars!

So why am I an A's fan? Because, from 1901 to 1954, they were the Philadelphia Athletics. Philadelphia is my home town. The A's were the team I loved as a kid, and no gap of space or time can fray that bond.

'Ouija' has a steady directorial hand, some attractive young actors who taking the silliness seriously, and few admirable genre elements. It renounces the faux-found-footage ShakyCam style, instead employing a traditionally smooth visual style.

Tarantino's movies are smartly intoxicating cocktails of rampage and meditation, they're in-your-face, with a mac-10 machine pistol and a quote from the Old Testament. They blend U.S. and European styles of filmmaking, they bring novelistic devices to the movie mall.

'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.

The big gamble in 'Focus' - it's a Will Smith movie that dares to be small.

The 1930s birthed two great agrarian novels: 'Gone with the Wind' from the viewpoint of the ruling class, 'The Grapes of Wrath' for the underclass. And both were turned into movies that dared to be true to the books' controversial themes.

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.

The exact meaning of irony is so narrow that the word is hardly worth using, in its broad, current definition, it's a euphemism for sarcasm. 'I'm not being sarcastic, I'm being ironic.' No, you're not. You're evading the responsibility for being sarcastic.

'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.

The music was the best thing about the Four Seasons and the central asset of the 'Jersey Boys' show. By concentrating on the group's personal wrangling, to the near exclusion of their songs, Clint Eastwood has jettisoned the joy and made this a one-Season movie: winter in New Jersey. And, man, that's bleak.

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.

The typical baseball play is a pitcher throwing a ball and the batter not swinging at it, while the other players watch. Even a home run, the sport's defining big blast, is only metaphorically exciting, a fly ball that leaves the yard changes the score but may offer no more compelling view than an outfielder staring up.

The people who run Hollywood are supposed to be masters at creating drama, suspense, thrills - at putting on a great show. If we knew not only who the winners were but also by how much they won, the Oscar show could actually be the Super Bowl of movies.

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.

There are movies whose feel-good sentiments and slick craft annoy me so deeply that I know they will become box-office successes or top prizewinners. I call this internal mechanism my Built-In Hit Detector.

'TIME's spell-check always admonishes me whenever I compose a sentence in the passive voice, a warning that is often ignored by me.

Throughout the movies' golden age, the Western enriched Hollywood financially and artistically. But in the 1970s, the genre lost its audience appeal to fantasy films of the 'Star Wars' stripe, which told more or less the same story - elemental animosities leading to an armed showdown - but at a faster tempo, and in outer space.

We all recall what is or was important to us and are astonished when it slips other people's minds. Perhaps we dismiss as irrelevant matters of crucial concern to those we love. That's life as most of us experience it, and which few movies document with such understated acuity as 'Boyhood' does.

Viewers who invest two hours in a superhero movie often leave feeling entertained but somehow dumber.

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.

World War II was a historical event, but also a movie genre, and 'Fury' occasionally prints the legend. The rest of it is plenty grim and grisly. Audience members may feel like prisoners of war forced to watch a training-torture film.

We lived a lovely, middle-class, suburban life in Philadelphia. And I really thought that the TV programs of the '50s, like 'Father Knows Best' and 'The Adventures Of Ozzie And Harriet' Nelson were documentaries filmed with hidden cameras in our neighborhood.

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?'

You know it's Oscar season when you see a slew of new movies based on true stories whose resolutions you can find in three seconds on Wikipedia.

You may debate whether the Disney heroines fit the feminist standard, but they don't live in a democracy. Remember, they're princesses.