To die is one thing. How much worse to know that all the life that ever existed on this planet, and all it ever achieved, was to be obliterated?

Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica.

Here it is at last, the first 150-minute trailer. Armageddon is cut together like its own highlights. Take almost any 30 seconds at random, and you'd have a TV ad. The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense, and the human desire to be entertained. No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out.

When I had been a film critic for ten minutes, I treated Doris Day as a target for cheap shots. I have learned enough to say today that the woman was remarkably gifted.

The film argues to the young that the old were young once, too, and contain within them all that the young know, and more.

Improvisation is a weird word because we often think it means that you make things up out of whole cloth right there on the spot, and that's rarely the case in acting. You have to know who the character is, what the situation is and what is needed.

In these days of high-tech video games, it's remarkable that kids once got incredibly thrilled while pushing little metal racing cars around a cardboard track: The toy car was yours, and you invested it with importance and enhanced it with fantasy and pitied it because it was small, like you were. Such games were weapons against the ennui of endless Saturdays.