Richard Corliss

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.

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.

I came of baseball age (isn't it always around first grade?) in the last sputtering years of the A's Philadelphia tenancy. I probably plighted my fated troth in 1949, when the A's fluked into a winning season and introduced a pintsize southpaw named Bobby Shantz.

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.

A movie like 'Selma' should be a relic in a time capsule from 1965, a clue to how well we heeded King's words and how far we have advanced. Instead, it is a reminder that the 'American problem' has yet to be solved.

The movie truism is that stars play themselves, while actors play other people - troubled or toxic, and memorably strange. By that definition, Philip Seymour Hoffman, who disappeared into the rabbit hole of his characters' souls, was our generation's anti-star and the chameleonic film actor of his age.

If you think of the 1930s in film as the decade of Gable and Lombard, Cagney and Harlow, Stanwyck and the Marx Brothers, think again. The biggest star - No. 1 in the 1936, '37 and '38 exhibitor polls - was a three-time box-office champ before she was 10. Shirley Temple, singer, dancer, and prime exemplar of Movie Cute, owned the '30s.

TIME's spell-check always admonishes me whenever I compose a sentence in the passive voice, a warning that is often ignored by me.

In their plush melodies and plummy platitudes, many Rodgers-and-Hammerstein songs were secular hymns, which so insinuated themselves into the ear of the Eisenhower-era listener that they became the liturgical music for the American mid-century.

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.

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.

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.