It rekindles the great Hollywood romances.

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

Nothing ages so quickly as yesterday's vision of the future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jimmy Stewart lived for movies, fought for his country, and died for love. Now isn't that a wonderful life?

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

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

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

Years from now, when cinephiles are asked to name the movies' golden age, they'll say it was when Cate Blanchett was in them.

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

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

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.

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.

It is an actor's passion to observe the world. It is his art to become what he observes. And finally, it is his job to let the world observe him.

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.

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

[Michael Hastings] has composed a dirge to incompatibility, which, because it raises expectations only to defeat them, leaves a taste of exhumed ashes.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bond, especially Connery's Bond, was an existential hired gun with an aristocrat's tastes - just right for a time when class was a matter of brand names and insouciant gestures.

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.

Today is a time of turbulence and stagnation, of threat and promise from a competitor: the magic, omnivorous videocassette recorder (VCR). In other words, it is business as usual.

The Disney animators' rules on adult females: mothers are perfect but imperiled; stepmothers are wicked and occasionally homicidal; godmothers are sweet things with magical powers.

'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 '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.

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.

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!

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?

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.

'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.

As the idealized mother, I might choose Irene Dunne as the mother in 'I Remember Mama' who strives and not just cooks and scrubs for her children, but who also acts as her daughter's literary agent.

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.

'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.

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