Richard Corliss
'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.Collection: Smile
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.Collection: Car
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.'Collection: Teen
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.Collection: Sympathy
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.
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.
'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.
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!
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.
Starring Russell Crowe as the Patron of the First Ark, 'Noah' had affronted some Christian literalists with its giant rock men, its weird visions, and the occasionally dark motives of its protagonist. But the film corralled enough religious leaders, including Pope Francis (with whom Crowe snagged an audience), to salve canonical objections.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Hollywood was born schizophrenic. For 75 years it has been both a town and a state of mind, an industry and an art form.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 '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.
'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.
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.
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.
The big gamble in 'Focus' - it's a Will Smith movie that dares to be small.
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.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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?'
Hollywood has always seen Sondheim as a caviar brand unsuitable for a popcorn industry.
You may debate whether the Disney heroines fit the feminist standard, but they don't live in a democracy. Remember, they're princesses.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
'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.
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.
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.
Africa is the continent that the rest of the world prefers not to think about.
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.