Richard Corliss

Has any movie captured a moment in social, let alone musical, history with as much acuity and joy as 'A Hard Day's Night'?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

In film schools of the future, professors will teach 'Tammy' as an object lesson in Making Everything Go Wrong.

It's a fallacy, long rebuffed by science, that humans use only about 10% of their brainpower. But it is true about most summer movies. Pouring their wizardry into special effects and well-choreographed fights, warm-weather action films rarely challenge the viewer with grand notions or beautifully baffling imagery.

Before sequels became the most reliable way to make a buck, Bond set the standard for lavish serial adventures. Before Hollywood found gold in multimillion-dollar adaptations of comic-book characters - in the Superman, Batman and Spider-Man blockbusters - Bond was the movies' first big-budget franchise superhero.