Top 100 Corliss Quotes
#1. The highest ethical duty is often to discard the outmoded ethics of the past. - Corliss Lamont, humanist philosopher
Dale McGowan
#2. You are not my wife yet, to concern yourself in my affairs."
"And when I am your wife?"
His conscience pricked him, making him snap, "You will learn not to question me."
-Royce to Corliss-
Johanna Lindsey
#3. 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
#4. Corliss had never once considered the fate of library books. She'd never wondered how many books go unread. She loved books. How could she not worry about the unread? She felt like a disorganized scholar, an inconsiderate lover, an abusive mother, and a cowardly soldier.
Sherman Alexie
#5. How many books do you have here?" Corliss asked. "Two million, one hundred thousand, and eleven," the librarian said proudly, but Corliss was frightened. What happens to the world when that many books go unread? And what happens to the unread authors of those unread books?
Sherman Alexie
#6. '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
#7. Disney features, especially the early ones, were horror movies with cute critters: Greek tragedies with a hummable chorus. Forcing children to confront the loss of home, parent, friends and fondest pets, these films imposed shock therapy on four-year-olds.
Richard Corliss
#8. 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
#9. I think ... that philosophy has the duty of pointing out the falsity of outworn religious ideas, however estimable they may be as a form of art. We cannot act as if all religion were poetry while the greater part of it still functions in its ancient guise of illicit science and backward morals ...
Corliss Lamont
#10. Feelings of right and wrong that at first have their locus within the family gradually develop into a pattern for the tribe or city, then spread to the much larger unit of the nation, and finally from the nation to mankind as a whole.
Corliss Lamont
#11. 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.
Richard Corliss
#12. In 'Se7en' and 'Fight Club,' Fincher proved his suave mastery of film violence; in Zodiac, his way of clarifying the many clues in a murder thriller. As he showed in 'The Social Network,' the director also knows that no wound is more toxic than a friend's betrayal.
Richard Corliss
#13. '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
#14. Innocent parents might have thought that a musical cartoon version of a fairy tale would be a child's ideal introduction to movie magic. Yet Walt Disney taught moral lessons in the most useful way: by scaring the poop out of the little ones.
Richard Corliss
#15. It is said that no star is a heroine to her makeup artist.
Richard Corliss
#16. Nixon, with his mellifluous baritone, was a great politician for radio but creepy on TV.
Richard Corliss
#17. A movie like 'Transcendence' may be pertinent in its political reverberations of all computer data held in a cloud and monitored by the NSA, but it also rails against the tools its makers so artfully employ.
Richard Corliss
#18. World War II was a historical event, but also a movie genre, and 'Fury' occasionally prints the legend. The rest of it is plenty grim and grisly. Audience members may feel like prisoners of war forced to watch a training-torture film.
Richard Corliss
#19. '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
#20. Human beings and their actions constitute the advancing front, the surging crest of an ongoing movement that never stops.
Corliss Lamont
#21. 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
#22. Humanism involves far more than the negation of supernaturalism. It requires an affirmative philosophy ... translated into a life devoted to one's own improvement and the service of all mankind.
Corliss Lamont
#23. 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.
Richard Corliss
#24. Intuition does not in itself amount to knowledge, yet cannot be disregarded by philosophers and psychologists.
Corliss Lamont
#25. 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
#26. 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.
Richard Corliss
#27. How many mothers have emerged from a family trip to a Disney movie and been obliged to explain the facts of death to their sobbing young? A conservative estimate: the tens of millions, since the studio's first animated feature, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' premiered in 1937.
Richard Corliss
#28. 'Ouija' has a steady directorial hand, some attractive young actors who taking the silliness seriously, and few admirable genre elements. It renounces the faux-found-footage ShakyCam style, instead employing a traditionally smooth visual style.
Richard Corliss
#29. 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
#30. '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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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.
Richard Corliss
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. [Michael Hastings] has composed a dirge to incompatibility, which, because it raises expectations only to defeat them, leaves a taste of exhumed ashes.
Richard Corliss
#37. 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
#38. My time on this world is limited, but the things I can do with that time are not.
Jeb Corliss
#39. 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
#40. Like 'God's Not Dead,' the fundamentalist Christian movie that has become a popular hit, 'Transcendence' is essentially a dramatized debate. And as 'God's Not Dead' stacks the rhetorical cards for the Deity's existence, the Pfister film eventually hangs back with the Luddites.
Richard Corliss
#41. The big gamble in 'Focus' - it's a Will Smith movie that dares to be small.
Richard Corliss
#42. 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.
Richard Corliss
#43. True freedom is the capacity for acting according to one's true character, to be altogether one's self, to be self-determined and not subject to outside coercion.
Corliss Lamont
#44. The theory that everyone acts from self-interest, direct or indirect, is psychologically unsound ... Throughout history ... there have been millions of men and women with some sort of Humanist philosophy who have consciously given up their lives for a social ideal.
Corliss Lamont
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space.
Richard Corliss
#48. 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
#49. Years from now, when cinephiles are asked to name the movies' golden age, they'll say it was when Cate Blanchett was in them.
Richard Corliss
#50. Overemphasis on the sex aspect of morality has led to a neglect of its other aspects and a narrowing of its range.
Corliss Lamont
#51. 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
#52. '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
#53. 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.
Richard Corliss
#54. The dynamic, creative present, however conditioned and restricted by the effects of prior presents, possesses genuine initiative.
Corliss Lamont
#55. 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
#56. You can't let the fear of something completely and absolutely inevitable ...
Jeb Corliss
#57. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. We do not ask to be born; and we do not ask to die. But born we are and die we must. We come into existence and we pass out of existence. And in neither case does high-handed fate await our ratification of its decree.
Corliss Lamont
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. The visual team of 'Blade Runner' - one of the last big fantasy movies to be made without much computer graphics finery - worked directly for Scott, who sketched each of his prolific ideas on paper (they were called 'Ridley-grams').
Richard Corliss
#66. 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.
Richard Corliss
#67. Supernatural entities simply do not exist. This nonreality of the supernatural means, on the human level, that men do not possess supernatural and immortal souls; and, on the level of the universe as a whole, that our cosmos does not possess a supernatural and eternal God.
Corliss Lamont
#68. 'Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,' while not nearly the masterpiece proclaimed by many critics, is certainly a fascinating cross-species: a big-budget summer action fantasy with a sylvan, indie-film vibe, and a war movie that dares ask its audience to root for the peacemakers.
Richard Corliss
#69. 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.
Richard Corliss
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. Football's a war game without fatal casualties; baseball is a picnic on a huge field, without the food.
Richard Corliss
#73. '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
#74. 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
#75. In film schools of the future, professors will teach 'Tammy' as an object lesson in Making Everything Go Wrong.
Richard Corliss
#76. 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.
Richard Corliss
#77. 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
#78. Though not really a comedy, 'Rosewater' is a demonstration of the creed behind 'The Daily Show': belief in the crucial need for impious wit against entrenched power. The freedom of the press is also the freedom to depress - and to inspire. That's a message that can outlive any Oscar season.
Richard Corliss
#79. Ambitious of vision and swooping of camera, 'I, Frankenstein' is no 'I, Robot,' let alone 'I, Claudius,' but it's definitely watchable on a cold Jan. evening or, a few months from now, on your I, Pad.
Richard Corliss
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. There is no place in the Humanist worldview for either immortality or God in the valid meanings of those terms. Humanism contends that instead of the gods creating the cosmos, the cosmos, in the individualized form of human beings giving rein to their imagination, created the gods.
Corliss Lamont
#83. Since Humanism as a functioning credo is so closely bound up with the methods of reason and science, plainly free speech and democracy are its very lifeblood. For reason and scientific method can flourish only in an atmosphere of civil liberties.
Corliss Lamont
#84. 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.
Richard Corliss
#85. Football has end zones and goal posts; basketball has the hoop, and hockey the goal cage. Baseball is the only game with an imaginary box: the strike zone, which the umpire determines at his own discretion.
Richard Corliss
#86. 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
#88. If you want to do amazing things with your life ...
Jeb Corliss
#89. Viewers who invest two hours in a superhero movie often leave feeling entertained but somehow dumber.
Richard Corliss
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. '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
#93. Nixon's shifty eyes and perpetual 5 o'clock shadow made him a natural fit for caricatured villainy.
Richard Corliss
#94. Hollywood has always seen Sondheim as a caviar brand unsuitable for a popcorn industry.
Richard Corliss
#95. Most men, I am convinced, have an unmistakable feeling at the final moment of significant choice that they are making a free decision, that they can really decide which one of two or more roads to follow.
Corliss Lamont
#96. Africa is the continent that the rest of the world prefers not to think about.
Richard Corliss
#97. Nothing ages so quickly as yesterday's vision of the future.
Richard Corliss
#98. Famous for his 'Maverick' Western series in the 1950s and 'The Rockford Files' in the '70s, and in movies like 'The Great Escape' and 'Grand Prix' in between, James Garner played amiable, independent characters for more than a half-century and never lost his comforting, enduring appeal.
Richard Corliss
#99. 'Noah' is about a man whose mission is to obliterate Earth's past and godfather its future. Replacing the word 'God' with 'Creator' and taking other scriptural liberties, the movie risks confusing those who don't take the Bible literally and alienating those who do.
Richard Corliss
#100. 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
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