Associate Editor Richard Corliss was 16 years old when a viewing of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal in Corliss's native Philadelphia transformed a budding romance with film into a serious relationship. "I had grown up thinking of movies as something to eat popcorn with," says Corliss. "Bergman and the other European directors were the first ones to open my eyes to film as art." Though Corliss has since cut down on popcorn, his taste for movies has broadened to include "mass" as well as "class" films by directors in all parts of the world. His experience as a film reviewer has also broadened. Before coming to TIME as a film and television critic in June 1980, he worked as a reviewer for the National Review, New Times magazine, Maclean's and the Soho Weekly News.

Corliss, who views more than 500 films a year, is dismayed by what he sees as the "new conventionality and conformity" of the film industry. Says he: "Film makers have become more financially oriented, which means pandering to a younger audience with a taste for romantic comedies and slick horror films. At the current rate, senility should hit Hollywood about March of 1990." When he is not reviewing for TIME, Corliss is busy preparing new issues of Film Comment, a bimonthly journal (circ. 30,000) that he has edited since 1970. He has also written two books: Talking Pictures and Greta Garbo. Once a year, Corliss interrupts his hectic schedule to serve on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival, which means screening as many as 200 films over a period of seven weeks. "Film festivals are usually part summer camp and part penal camp," he says. "But it helps to know that amid the rubbish, it is still possible to recognize a truly fine film when it surfaces."

In his three-page contribution to this week's cover package on Actress Meryl Streep, Corliss delved into the literary and structural artifices that characterize her new movie The French Lieutenant's Woman. Corliss, who also wrote last year's cover story on the prime-time television soap opera Dallas, found Harold Pinter's transmutation of John Fowles' multilayered novel into a film-within-a-film a challenging experiment. Concludes Corliss: "Because of its complexity and cerebral detachment, The French Lieutenant's Woman is a difficult film to fall in love with--but the performance by Streep is not. It marks the coming of age of a potentially great screen actress."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.