When the Doors became huge, what nascent rock intelligentsia existed at the time adored them.
The beautifully composed imagery of '12 Years a Slave' underscores the savagery of its subject, which is an American South not of knights and ladies but obscene values and a grotesque pageantry, every gorgeous shot of the languid landscape radiating toxicity like a hyperlush blossom that's poison to the touch.
In the culture at large, the war over science fiction's creative validity has been long since won, but guardians at the gates of literature, movies, and TV linger unconvinced, even as other genres fitfully transcend critical perceptions of insubstantiality.
White Americans believe we've made more progress since the end of slavery in 1865 than do black Americans for whom '12 Years a Slave' documents a collective memory, passed down in the genes and by the lore of generations.
Even to current-events junkies, the notion of a 24-hour news channel sounded like a gimmick when the Cable News Network launched more than 30 years ago.
In retrospect, 'Pulp Fiction' isn't just the template for everything Tarantino has done but the yardstick by which everything else he does is measured one way or another.
Redford always has been a cool presence both before and behind the camera. His best movie as a filmmaker, 1994's 'Quiz Show,' exhibits a classicism verging on self-repression, and the social indignation in many of his films engages more than moves you.
Every thought and word that a novelist thinks or writes is part of that castle constructed from sands on the beach of Me, including the turret or rampart or moat he may have thought or written on behalf of someone or something else.
Walt Disney had a nuclear imagination before the advent of nuclear, some comprehension of apocalypse and rapture deep in his genes.
Julianne Moore and Michael Keaton began in 1980s soap operas and 1970s sitcoms, respectively, such ancient history by show business standards that you need carbon dating to measure their careers.
Scarlett Johansson has a smile she tries to suppress in every movie she makes. She's been trying to keep a straight face since she appeared with Bill Murray 11 years ago in her breakthrough, 'Lost in Translation.'
To an extent, our relationship with the movies is always subjective. Our capacity to be involved says as much about each of us; I've never fathomed why anyone would want to spend four hours in the company of the exceedingly tiresome Scarlett O'Hara.
I own one movie by fellow Swede Ingmar Bergman, because I have to. You can't be a movie critic with a collection of six or seven hundred DVDs that includes everything from 'Tokyo Story' to 'Poison Ivy: The New Seduction' and not have a Bergman movie.
Nothing manifests more persuasively the American contradiction than that the author of the Declaration of Independence, a slave owner, wrote an antislavery clause into the document - as if to compel himself to be better than he was - which then had to be edited out so the Southern states, including Thomas Jefferson's own, would sign it.
All of Wes Anderson's films are confections, memoirs created in cinematic snow globes, with the subtext that memory is the most extraordinary confection of all.
When people start yammering about artistic responsibility, artists become wary. The subtext of such talk is that the arts need to be regulated, which is to say censored.
In their matching candy-stripe shirts, the Beach Boys were America's biggest band of the early '60s, transmitting utopian bulletins of summer without end to a cold and overcast nation.
Americans should be ashamed of how aflutter they get about Downton Abbey - it's unpatriotic. I seem to remember we fought a revolution so as not to put up with this nonsense, where notions of station are so unforgiving that upper and lower echelons are practically different species.
That godfather of the modern action blockbuster, 'The Godfather,' is entirely character driven, propelled by the transformation of a crime lord's youngest son, who breaks bad when he evolves from white-sheep war hero to blood-soaked inheritor of his father's empire.
