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The automobile and its various offshoots, those gas-guzzling, defining innovations of the twentieth century, are as integral to movies as they are to our daily routines. Since films are the magic mirror held up to our everyday lives with, as Hitchcock said, “the dull bits left out,” this only makes sense.

The attention always goes straight to her violet eyes, and why shouldn’t it? Violet eyes don’t show up every day, and when magnified on screen, they will knock you off your feet. But Elizabeth Taylor was so much more than those mesmerizing irises, and her beauty did not hold her back from delivering passionate, believable performances.

Space certainly gives us humans plenty to think about, and the question of what lies beyond our solar system is still awaiting a full answer. This year, the revived series “Cosmos” had us scratching our heads as we contemplated the abyss, and even with the laws of physics greatly simplified, the universe is still too big for our primitive brains to grasp. Now comes director Christopher Nolan’s thinking person’s space movie “Interstellar,” and with it, a renewed interest in the possibilities of “out there.”

We’ve all done it, watched a movie and thought, “How do they think this stuff up?” and, “Do they expect us to believe this?” Yes, “they” do, because movies depend on the suspension of disbelief for their magic. Musicals, horror, and romantic comedies are all fueled by the high octane of fantasy.

She was born Ruth Elizabeth Davis in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1908, and was, by her own admission, a Yankee.

Rita Hayworth broke your heart and made it flutter, all at once. Born into a show business family of dancers, she grew up in the footlights, and her dazzling beauty made her future as a Hollywood starlet seem inevitable. And so it was. In the mid-thirties, Columbia Pictures put her under a long-term contract, transforming dark-haired teenager Rita Cansino into redhead bombshell Rita Hayworth.

Robert Duvall fully earns the hallowed term “actor’s actor.” He is superb in most anything he’s in. And at age 83, he’s still doing his thing. On a plane recently, I finally caught Tom Cruise’s diverting thriller “Jack Reacher” (2012), and there was octogenarian Duvall playing a gun dealer, stealing every scene he was in. Watching him ace this small but key supporting role made me feel it was time to pay tribute to a man who’s appeared in some of the greatest films of the past half-century.   Born to William Howard Duvall, a career military officer from Virginia, and his wife Mildred, an amateur actress and descendant of General Robert E. Lee, Duvall's childhood was peripatetic; his father was transferred frequently to various bases around the country.

Baby boomers who grew up watching a lot of television probably know Eddie Albert best as Oliver Douglas, the city lawyer turned farmer on “Green Acres.” But like many actors who star in a popular TV series, Albert became so closely identified with the role that it’s almost jarring to see him in a movie, or to realize he’d been one of Hollywood’s most reliable character actors.

“Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.”                            — Federico Fellini (1920-1993)