Richard Corliss Quotes

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

Ambitious of vision and swooping of camera, ‘I, Frankenstein’ is no ‘I, Robot,’ let alone ‘I, Claudius,’ but it’s definitely watchable on a cold Jan. evening or, a few months from now, on your I, Pad.

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.

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.

Big-time directors and the studios that bankroll them prefer to dwell in the comfortable, familiar center, where mammon is God and the only divine word comes from focus groups.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

‘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.

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

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

‘Noah’ is about a man whose mission is to obliterate Earth’s past and godfather its future. Replacing the word ‘God’ with ‘Creator’ and taking other scriptural liberties, the movie risks confusing those who don’t take the Bible literally and alienating those who do.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.