In this Time Richard Corliss piece about the battle between celluloid and digital photography, director Michael Mann (Collateral, Heat) argues that digital is “capable of a chromatic subtlety that film can’t match.” Collateral, Mann claims, was “the first photo-real use of digital…[and] in the nightscapes in Collateral, you’re seeing buildings a mile away. You’re seeing clouds in the sky four or five miles away. On film that would all just be black.” Mann used the same digital process to shoot his big-screen version of Miami Vice with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx.

Time‘s Richard Corliss on the great Terrence Howard: “He exudes a charismatic musk as DJay, the pimp-turned-rapper in the indie film Hustle & Flow. Those soft eyes, the feline athleticism, a voice that can caress subtlety into any dialogue — viewers get a taste of that, and in a minute they say, ‘This guy’s a natural star.'”

Time‘s Richard Corliss writes that a generic Ralph Fiennes performance — and particularly the very fine one he gives in The Constant Gardener (Focus Features, 8.31)– “is a miniature device with intricate moving parts. Movie directors often want their actors to ‘go bigger.’ Fiennes goes smaller — and inside. His onscreen speech is a mix of concealments and confidences, of whispers in a cave or under the covers. And he’s not speaking softly just so you will be startled when he explodes.” A striking example is a scene in which Fiennes, playing a British diplomat stationed in Kenya, is told that his wife Tessa (Rachel Weiscz) may have been killed. “As the camera holds on him, searching for a reaction, Fiennes doesn’t conjure up a rage or a gasp. He doesn’t gush a stream of tears or obscenities. He moves hardly at all. Yet alert viewers will see his pale face turn a shade ashen. They will watch his spirit sink as he struggles to retain propriety. Somehow a symphony of grief, suspicion and copelessness plays lightly on his sharp, elegant features.”

Time‘s Richard Corliss has declared that Closer (Columbia, 12.3) “runs counter to the numbing predictability of most current films: the inevitable plot points of revenge and uplift, the reduction of human beings to heroes and villains, the avoidance of complexity in sexual matters.” And director Mike Nicohols observes in the same piece, “I thought we were way past being able to shock anybody …but people are shocked [by this film]. It’s not necessarily because of the language but because things that usually go unexplored are explored in public. Some people are armed against it. They say, ‘I just don’t know those people.’ Well, they’re you, man!”

Old-school, classic-era film critic Richard Corliss, one of the brightest, sharpest and most highly regarded film seers and scholars of the late 20th Century and early aughts, a guy whose opinions caused shifts in the tectonic plates of Hollywood commerce during his Time days of the ’80s and ’90s, died last night from a stroke. He was only 71. I’m sure he was planning to cover next month’s Cannes Film Festival, which he’s been attending without fail for decades (and at which he always wore those same color-dappled, studio-logo slip-on canvas sneakers), and I’ll bet he’s hugely pissed about missing it.

Richard Corliss (1944 – 2015).

Sad hugs and condolences to his wife Mary and all his friends, colleagues, ex-editors and admirers.

From my struggling freelance perspective the four biggest guns of the Manhattan film critic realm in the ’70s and ’80s were Corliss, Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris and Richard Schickel, who’s thankfully still with us. There’s a certain metaphor in the passing of these departed legends of print, prose and inspired perception. FishbowlNY‘s Richard Horgan commented last September on the gradual weakening of the power of the classic film critic gang and the rise of online film crowd and the passing of the baton.

“By standards of quality, the DGA’s choice of Tom Hooper, director of The King’s Speech, over The Social Network‘s David Fincher is indefensible,” writes Time‘s Richard Corliss.

“Hooper manages his principal players (Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter) expertly enough but forces the supporting actors into caricature. His camera style is stodgy, and his handling of a delicate subject lurid but not invigorating. He’ll do anything — peel onions — to make his audience cry. He commits all the sins of omission and commission that Fincher avoids. And this is one more reason The King’s Speech will triumph on Oscar night: if mediocre work wins in Hollywood’s official circles, it tends to keep on winning.

“When The King’s Speech had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September, I pointed out the ways in which, by coincidence or cynicism, the movie followed virtually every rule of a Best Picture winner. It’s a biopic of a real person; it is set on or near World War II, with Hitler’s shadow looming; it dramatizes a man’s heroic struggle over some physical or psychological infirmity; and it’s got oodles of those classy British actors.

“Other Academy watchers noticed the same thing: Steve Pond, resident Oscar savant of industry website The Wrap, predicted a Best Picture win before he had even seen it. And it would be odd indeed if the people the movie was designed for — the senior Hollywood professionals who vote on the Oscars — didn’t go for it.”

The main point in a 4.6 piece about the just-deceased Jules Dassin by Time‘s Richard Corliss is that aside from his reputation as the father of the sophisticated heist film, he was a gifted but not exceptionally talented in-and-outer who lived through a 40-year dry spell after his last big hit, Topkapi, in 1964.

That’s not an unfair verdict, but some of what Corliss says veers on the mean-spirited. He under-values, at the very least, the delicious aroma of first-rate heist films, and how grateful millions are for the survival of the genre, and that Dassin did something really special by simultaneously creating and upgrading in one fell swoop.
Corliss reminds that an official remake of Rififi is due out next year, with Al Pacino as the Tony le Stephanois character. Is that so? With Harold Becker directing and a screenplay by Bo Goldman? I thought that had gone by the wayside. I thought Al Pacino had been hypnotized and kidnapped by Jon Avnet.

“It’s an odd thing, but in recent years, just about every movie that attempts a sophisticated take on romance, has turned out to be strained and witless. All the successful recent comedies (The 40 Year Old Virgin, The Wedding Crashers and Knocked Up, to name three) have tended toward the raunchy end of the spectrum. It’s as if Hollywood’s wise guys have recognized that middle-class American life is just too complicated, perhaps even too inherently miserable, to get an intelligent handle on.

“You can’t quite treat [modern relationships] as a tragedy but you can turn to its first cousin — farce — and have some profitable fun with it. And who can blame them? Or us, for the benumbed state that something like Definitely, Maybe leaves us in.” — from Richard Corliss‘s 2.14 review in Time.

In a capsule review, Time critic Richard Corliss — usually a fairly adventurous sort and certainly no rigid conservative — has slammed Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood (Paramount Vantage, 12.26), using terms like “daft” and “deranged zone.” No worries — it’s a solvable issue. Corliss has to see it a second time, is all.

After my first Blood screening, I knew it was masterful but I felt traumatized, appalled, thrown off. The second time I saw it for what it was — a diseased but riveting American epic without an ounce of fat or pretense — and the matter of my initial emotional response went by the wayside.

“Ambition can drive a man to greatness or drive him to destruction, or do both,” Corliss begins. “That was the theme of many novels of the early 20th century. One, Upton Sinclair‘s “Oil”, is the inspiration for this inward, wayward epic that spans 30 years of a tycoon’s career. Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis, parading surface charm over a black heart) builds an oil empire on his tenacity, his ruthlessness and his seeming saving grace: a devotion to his son (Dillon Freasier), whom he totes from job to job.

“Anderson’s previous movies (Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love) all teemed with vigorous eccentrics muscling themselves onto the screen. This film is stern, unaccommodating and, finally, daft. It’s of a mind with its antihero, who says, ‘I don’t care to explain myself.’ By the end, when Daniel faces off with a longtime preacher rival (Paul Dano), the movie has retreated into its own deranged zone, to which even sympathetic viewers are forbidden.”

With two lines and one fell swoop, Time‘s Richard Corliss has simultaneously given Charlie Wilson’s War a nice pat on the back and damned its Oscar chances with faint praise. Death quote #1: “It could be the one war film people will enjoy seeing.” Death quote #2: “Audiences should have a great time watching it.”

Corliss is saying the film has a decent shot with the “leave-us-aloners” who’ve avoided all the Middle Eastern sand movies thus far. He’s not saying it’s a lock with this crowd — words like “should” and “could” in this context are obviously fraught with qualification — but he’s obviously implying that a moviegoer who enjoys going to Disneyworld one week may also have a good time with Charlie Wilson’s War the next.

Mike Nichols‘ film is about a good-time Texas Congressman (Tom Hanks), a Houston socialtie (Julia Roberts) and a CIA guy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) helping to surreptitiously funnel arms to Afgahnistan’s mujahdin in their early ’80s battle against the Soviet invaders. Corliss is calling it “at heart a can-do comedy about a wheeler-dealer having a good time doing good.”

Richard Corliss Darjeeling Limited Venice Film Festival Blast #1 (about the similarities between Owen Wilson and the character he plays): “It’s a shock, but not a surprise, to see Owen Wilson in The Darjeeling Limited, the new semi-comedy from Wes Anderson that premiered at the Venice Film Festival last night.” And a little jarring, he adds, when you consider dialogue in which Owen’s head-bandaged character says he has “some healing to do” but is “still alive” after he “smashed into a hill on purpose on my motorcycle.”

“As Francis Whitman, the eldest of the three Whitman brothers, Owen is clearly in physical distress,” Corliss reports. “His head is wrapped in two thick bandages, one horizontal, one vertical, as if to keep his brains from seeping out. The nose Wilson’s fans know to be charmingly broken has a Band Aid on it. His right hand and wrist are taped, and he uses a cane to walk.

“He looks a mess — funny, in the context of the film; not so, given Wilson’s hospitalization a week ago for what was described as a slashed-wrist suicide attempt. The actor was released Saturday and is in his Santa Monica home, People.com reported, under 24-hour watch by friends and family, instead of on the red carpet in Venice.

“In the movie, Francis is a man on a quest: to reconnect with his brothers Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman). They’ve met in India, on a long train trip, for what Francis hopes will be a three-way spiritual quest. ‘I want us to be completely open,’ he tells Peter and Jack, ‘and say yes to everything, even if it’s shocking and painful.’ Okay, then, Peter has an open question for Francis: ‘What happened to your face?’

“He had an accident, Francis replies, and banged himself up pretty severely. Of his surgeons, he says, ‘They did all the procedures right, the result of which is I’m still alive.’ He admits he has ‘some healing to do,’ to which Jack cheerleadingly says, ‘Gettin’ there, though,’ and Peter offers the compliment, ‘Gives you character.’ Later Francis reveals that the incident was not quite an accident: ‘I smashed into a hill on purpose on my motorcycle.’

“This — along with the fact than Wilson is one of three brothers (Andrew and Luke are in movies too) — concludes the witness report on the coincidences between Francis Whitman and Owen Wilson. Enough already. I feel creepy just passing this information along, as if a critic were auditioning to be a coroner.”

Richard Corliss Darjeeling Limited Venice Film Festival Blast #2 (i.e., about the continuing Wes Anderson poised-attitude problem that dogs it): “Picaresque movies often feel longer than they are. For them to work, they need an interior spring with more thrust than Darjeeling Limited‘s attempt at reconstituted brotherhood. The problem is in Anderson’s approach, which is so super-cool, it’s chilly.

“In his elaborate visual construct, virtually every shot is followed by with the camera point-of-view shifted 90 or 180 degrees — which is geometrically groovy, no question, but pretty quickly predictable. Same goes for his stories, which rely on gifted people behaving goofily. Anderson has the attitude for comedy, but not the aptitude. His films are museum artifacts of what someone thought could be funny. They’re airless. Movies under glass.

“[Owen] Wilson has appeared in all five of Anderson’s feature films (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and the new one) and co-wrote the first three — the ones I prefer in the the director’s oeuvre. The Darjeeling script is by Anderson, Schwartzman and Roman Coppola (Francis’ son, Sofia’s brother) and it doesn’t add luster to anyone’s reputation.

“The Darjeeling program includes a related 13-min. film, Hotel Chevalier. Schwartzman’s Jack seems uneasy when he gets a call from an ex-girlfriend (Natalie Portman) who insists on showing up in his swank hotel room. He draws a bubble bath for her. They flirt and parry and wind up in bed, exchanging dialogue that we hear again, at the end of Darjeeling, as part of a story Jack has written.

“It’s a beguiling vignette that, as Closer and My Blueberry Nights did, shows Portman as a comic actress in fresh bloom. I wish that she, and some of the feeling and wit of the short film, had been in the long one.”

Jason Schwartzman, Natalie Portman in scene from a 13-minute Wes Anderson Darjeeling Limited short called Hotel Chevalier, which is described above by Corliss [still provided by Dazza Buser of www.natalieportman.com]