“It is said that no star is a heroine to her makeup artist.” — Richard Corliss

There are movies whose feel-good sentiments and slick craft annoy me so deeply that I know they will become box-office successes or top prizewinners. I call this internal mechanism my Built-In Hit Detector.

Tarantino's movies are smartly intoxicating cocktails of rampage and meditation; they're in-your-face, with a mac-10 machine pistol and a quote from the Old Testament. They blend U.S. and European styles of filmmaking; they bring novelistic devices to the movie mall.

Mausoleum air and anguished pauses: If this production were a poem, it would be mostly white space.

Hollywood was born schizophrenic. For 75 years it has been both a town and a state of mind, an industry and an art form.