Richard Corliss quotes:

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

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

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.

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

The visual palette suggests the creepy pastel paintings of Guy Peellaert (Rock Dreams); the fantasy battles with monsters and samurais echo the muscular landscapes of Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo. The movie is like an arrested adolescent's Google search run amok.

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?

It rekindles the great Hollywood romances.

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

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

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.

John Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath' also speaks urgently to today's concerns: the cratered trail of dreams for Mexican immigrants seeking a promised land in the Western [United States]; the perfidy of banks in foreclosing on poor people's homes; and the insurgent urge of the book's protagonist, Tom Joad, to speak truth to police power. 'Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy,' Tom promises, 'I'll be there.' In Salinas, Calif., Ferguson, Mo., or Staten Island, N.Y., Tom's truth goes marching on.

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