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.

Richard Corliss

Age Wit Who

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?

Richard Corliss

Life Business Art

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.

Richard Corliss

Work Us Tin

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.

Richard Corliss

Would Words Word

'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.

Richard Corliss

Yin Veronica Us

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.

Richard Corliss

Music Age Wit

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.

Richard Corliss

War Space Movies

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

Richard Corliss

Wood Woo Ways

'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.

Richard Corliss

Romantic Love Car

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.

Richard Corliss

You Wit Were

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.

Richard Corliss

UN Tackle T

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.

Richard Corliss

Movies Great Wrath

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

Richard Corliss

Will Smith Will Us

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.

Richard Corliss

Woo Week Voice

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.

Richard Corliss

Sympathy Car Valor

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.'

Richard Corliss

War Car Zen

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.

Richard Corliss

Age Wit Who

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.

Richard Corliss

Home Change Yard

'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.

Richard Corliss

Space Art UN

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.

Richard Corliss

Life Worldly World

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.

Richard Corliss

Money Who Which

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.

Richard Corliss

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.

Richard Corliss

'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.

Richard Corliss

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.

Richard Corliss

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

Richard Corliss

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.

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.

Richard Corliss

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.'

Richard Corliss

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

Richard Corliss

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

Richard Corliss

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

Richard Corliss

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.

Richard Corliss

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.

Richard Corliss

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.

Richard Corliss

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.

Richard Corliss

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.

Richard Corliss

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.

Richard Corliss

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.

Richard Corliss

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.

Richard Corliss

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.

Richard Corliss

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.

Richard Corliss

'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.

Richard Corliss

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!

Richard Corliss

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.

Richard Corliss

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.

Richard Corliss

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?'

Richard Corliss

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.

Richard Corliss

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.

Richard Corliss

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

Richard Corliss

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.

Richard Corliss