Richard Corliss Dies, Richard Corliss, whose well-informed and spirited movie reviews appeared in Time magazine for 35 years, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 71.
His wife, Mary, said the cause was complications of a stroke. He had been in a hospice care center.
A prolific contributor to Time who also wrote profiles, essays on popular culture, and television and theater reviews, Mr. Corliss was known for his firm opinions and punchy prose, melding the forthright Time style and its compact format to a joy in deadline invention.
An unabashed movie fan who believed that a couple of hours in a theater was time well spent no matter what the movie was — “Everything is worth seeing,” he often said, as Time’s Richard Zoglin wrote in an obituary on the magazine’s website — he was nonetheless hardly a pushover as a critic and occasionally relished the contrarian view.
Among the popular films he disdained were Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H,” the basis for the television show about American Army surgeons during the Korean War, about which he wrote in The New York Times (before his tenure at Time began) that the supposedly charming and mischievous protagonists were boorish bullies; “Titanic,” the James Cameron hit whose special effects Mr. Corliss praised but whose dramatic storytelling he panned, and whose economic prospects he got spectacularly wrong (“Dead in the water,” he predicted); “A Chorus Line,” Richard Attenborough’s adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical that Mr. Corliss found, at best, inoffensive; and “The Full Monty,” the British comedy about laid-off steelworkers who concoct a striptease act, which he condemned as a formulaically sentimental audience-pleaser, lumping it with “Ghost,” “Cinema Paradiso” and other, in his phrase, “masterpieces of emotional pornography.”
Even so, Mr. Corliss’s work shone brightest when he could vent his eclectic enthusiasms, from George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino to Ingmar Bergman and François Truffaut, from Chinese kung fu films to Disney animation, from high-minded, ambience-saturated dramas like Anthony Minghella’s “The English Patient” to quirky teen tales like John Hughes’s “The Breakfast Club.”
“For most folks, déjà vu may provoke a momentary shudder, the creepy sense of having sidestepped into the twilight zone,” he wrote in 1993. “For Hollywood, though, it is a guiding principle. The industry wants audiences to feel they have seen this thing before but don’t know where or when. Nearly every movie plot is a reprise of a story that has already worked. Recombinant familiarity means box office; originality is an orphan, subversive and suspect. So let’s all cheer the emergence of ‘Groundhog Day,’ a very original comedy about déjà vu.”
Mr. Corliss promoted screenwriters against the headwind of opinion that said movies were made by auteur directors. He expressed adoration of movie stars as different as James Stewart and Cameron Diaz. In a 1985 review of the comedy-thriller “Into the Night,”,he described Michelle Pfeiffer as “drop-dead gorgeous,” purportedly coining the phrase.
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Richard Nelson Corliss was born in Philadelphia on March 6, 1944. His father, Paul, ran a business that manufactured chain-link fencing. His mother, the former Elizabeth McKluskey, taught first grade. After graduation from St. Joseph’s College (now University) in Philadelphia, Mr. Corliss did graduate work in film studies at Columbia, where he earned a master’s degree, and New York University.
In 1968, he met Mary Yushak, who was running the film stills department at the Museum of Modern Art; they married the next year. In addition to her, he is survived by a brother, Paul.
Mr. Corliss wrote about film for The Times, National Review and other publications in the late 1960s and ’70s. In 1970 he became editor of Film Comment, a journal, founded in the early 1960s, that was devoted largely to so-called art films, then the catchall term for independent films and documentaries.
During Mr. Corliss’s tenure, which lasted until the early 1980s, the magazine went from publishing quarterly to bimonthly and began including more essays and criticism about studio movies and Hollywood history. After the Film Society of Lincoln Center, sponsor of the New York Film Festival, took over the magazine’s publisher, Mr. Corliss served for many years on the festival’s selection committee. He joined Time in 1980 and shared movie critic’s duties there with Richard Schickel.
His books include “Talking Pictures” (1974), a survey, and critical defense, of American screenwriters; a 1994 study of “Lolita,” the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of the Nabokov novel; and an illustrated history, “Mom in the Movies: The Iconic Screen Mothers You Love and a Few You Love to Hate” (2014).
In 1990, exasperated by what he saw as a flourishing crop of glib critics on television and the onset of a thumbs-up/thumbs-down style of reviewing, Mr. Corliss defended his craft in an angry essay in Film Comment.
“The long view of cinema aesthetics is irrelevant to a moviegoer for whom history began with ‘Star Wars’,” he wrote. “A well-turned phrase is so much throat-clearing to a reader who wants the critic to cut to the chase: What movie is worth my two hours and six bucks this weekend? Movie criticism of the elevated sort, as practiced over the past half-century by James Agee and Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, J. Hoberman and Dave Kehr — in the mainstream press and in magazines like ‘Film Comment’— is an endangered species. Once it flourished; soon it may perish, to be replaced by a consumer service that is no brains and all thumbs.”
A prolific contributor to Time who also wrote profiles, essays on popular culture, and television and theater reviews, Mr. Corliss was known for his firm opinions and punchy prose, melding the forthright Time style and its compact format to a joy in deadline invention.
An unabashed movie fan who believed that a couple of hours in a theater was time well spent no matter what the movie was — “Everything is worth seeing,” he often said, as Time’s Richard Zoglin wrote in an obituary on the magazine’s website — he was nonetheless hardly a pushover as a critic and occasionally relished the contrarian view.
Among the popular films he disdained were Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H,” the basis for the television show about American Army surgeons during the Korean War, about which he wrote in The New York Times (before his tenure at Time began) that the supposedly charming and mischievous protagonists were boorish bullies; “Titanic,” the James Cameron hit whose special effects Mr. Corliss praised but whose dramatic storytelling he panned, and whose economic prospects he got spectacularly wrong (“Dead in the water,” he predicted); “A Chorus Line,” Richard Attenborough’s adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical that Mr. Corliss found, at best, inoffensive; and “The Full Monty,” the British comedy about laid-off steelworkers who concoct a striptease act, which he condemned as a formulaically sentimental audience-pleaser, lumping it with “Ghost,” “Cinema Paradiso” and other, in his phrase, “masterpieces of emotional pornography.”
Even so, Mr. Corliss’s work shone brightest when he could vent his eclectic enthusiasms, from George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino to Ingmar Bergman and François Truffaut, from Chinese kung fu films to Disney animation, from high-minded, ambience-saturated dramas like Anthony Minghella’s “The English Patient” to quirky teen tales like John Hughes’s “The Breakfast Club.”
“For most folks, déjà vu may provoke a momentary shudder, the creepy sense of having sidestepped into the twilight zone,” he wrote in 1993. “For Hollywood, though, it is a guiding principle. The industry wants audiences to feel they have seen this thing before but don’t know where or when. Nearly every movie plot is a reprise of a story that has already worked. Recombinant familiarity means box office; originality is an orphan, subversive and suspect. So let’s all cheer the emergence of ‘Groundhog Day,’ a very original comedy about déjà vu.”
Mr. Corliss promoted screenwriters against the headwind of opinion that said movies were made by auteur directors. He expressed adoration of movie stars as different as James Stewart and Cameron Diaz. In a 1985 review of the comedy-thriller “Into the Night,”,he described Michelle Pfeiffer as “drop-dead gorgeous,” purportedly coining the phrase.
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Richard Nelson Corliss was born in Philadelphia on March 6, 1944. His father, Paul, ran a business that manufactured chain-link fencing. His mother, the former Elizabeth McKluskey, taught first grade. After graduation from St. Joseph’s College (now University) in Philadelphia, Mr. Corliss did graduate work in film studies at Columbia, where he earned a master’s degree, and New York University.
In 1968, he met Mary Yushak, who was running the film stills department at the Museum of Modern Art; they married the next year. In addition to her, he is survived by a brother, Paul.
Mr. Corliss wrote about film for The Times, National Review and other publications in the late 1960s and ’70s. In 1970 he became editor of Film Comment, a journal, founded in the early 1960s, that was devoted largely to so-called art films, then the catchall term for independent films and documentaries.
During Mr. Corliss’s tenure, which lasted until the early 1980s, the magazine went from publishing quarterly to bimonthly and began including more essays and criticism about studio movies and Hollywood history. After the Film Society of Lincoln Center, sponsor of the New York Film Festival, took over the magazine’s publisher, Mr. Corliss served for many years on the festival’s selection committee. He joined Time in 1980 and shared movie critic’s duties there with Richard Schickel.
His books include “Talking Pictures” (1974), a survey, and critical defense, of American screenwriters; a 1994 study of “Lolita,” the Stanley Kubrick adaptation of the Nabokov novel; and an illustrated history, “Mom in the Movies: The Iconic Screen Mothers You Love and a Few You Love to Hate” (2014).
In 1990, exasperated by what he saw as a flourishing crop of glib critics on television and the onset of a thumbs-up/thumbs-down style of reviewing, Mr. Corliss defended his craft in an angry essay in Film Comment.
“The long view of cinema aesthetics is irrelevant to a moviegoer for whom history began with ‘Star Wars’,” he wrote. “A well-turned phrase is so much throat-clearing to a reader who wants the critic to cut to the chase: What movie is worth my two hours and six bucks this weekend? Movie criticism of the elevated sort, as practiced over the past half-century by James Agee and Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, J. Hoberman and Dave Kehr — in the mainstream press and in magazines like ‘Film Comment’— is an endangered species. Once it flourished; soon it may perish, to be replaced by a consumer service that is no brains and all thumbs.”
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