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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

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.

– Richard Corliss

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

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

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.

– 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

‘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

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

‘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

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

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.

– 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

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

– Richard Corliss

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.

– Richard Corliss

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.

– Richard Corliss

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

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

‘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

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

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

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

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

– Richard Corliss

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

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

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.

– Richard Corliss

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.

– Richard Corliss

‘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

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

– Richard Corliss

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.

– Richard Corliss

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.

– 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

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