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.

'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.

Every artist undresses his subject, whether human or still life. It is his business to find essences in surfaces, and what more attractive and challenging surface than the skin around a soul?

'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.

In his musicals with Garland, Rooney was the sparkplug for prodigious entrepreneurship - that era's predecessor of the garage band, but with Gershwin tunes and an all-star cast.

Throughout the movies' golden age, the Western enriched Hollywood financially and artistically. But in the 1970s, the genre lost its audience appeal to fantasy films of the 'Star Wars' stripe, which told more or less the same story - elemental animosities leading to an armed showdown - but at a faster tempo, and in outer space.

Almost any football play, even an off-tackle slant by a running back, offers the balletic beauty of athletic skill and the punishing drama of physical collision.

The 1930s birthed two great agrarian novels: 'Gone with the Wind' from the viewpoint of the ruling class, 'The Grapes of Wrath' for the underclass. And both were turned into movies that dared to be true to the books' controversial themes.

Texting has reduced the number of waste words, but it has also exposed a black hole of ignorance about traditional - what a cranky guy would call correct - grammar.