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“Dying is easy, comedy-that’s hard.”

There’s a reason why great lines from movies become part of the culture: they express feelings with a concision and accuracy that rarely, if ever, happens in real life. And nowhere is such eloquence more valuable than in affairs of the heart. Movies say what we would like to say, and in romantic movies they say what we would most love to have said to us.

As a kid, my favorite screen actor was Spencer Tracy. Like his close friend Bogart, the Ohio-born Tracy was not leading-man handsome, but became a star by projecting a unique and very human quality that viewers could readily access and admire: an everyman’s solidity masking an underlying sensitivity. He was known in Hollywood as the foremost “actor’s actor”— the player other actors measured themselves against. It’s easy to see why.

Great movies often reveal the drama or comedy lurking in the more mundane aspects of real life. As with literature and theatre, the normal, everyday quality of a story makes us believe, while the creative magic worked on it makes us care.

With our laser focus on human stars in films, it’s easy to forget that many outstanding movies depend on talent from the animal kingdom. Whether domesticated or wild, animals throw into sharp relief the highs and lows of human nature.

The movies' portrayal of women over time reflects the evolving social dynamic of the past century, revealing much about what has and hasn't changed. As certain special movies demonstrate, feminists were staking their territory long before there was a name for them.

Simply put, it is the season of sentiment. Sentiment drives every hour of the month of December, whether through nostalgia or wishes for the future. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the most romantic Christmas movies were made in the 1940s, a time when lovers were often parted by war and optimism was badly needed.

James Brown, the "Godfather of Soul," will finally get his due in director Tate Taylor’s "Get On Up," out this week some 12 years after Brian Grazer (who co-produced it with Mick Jagger) first tried to get the project off the ground.   Early reviews champion star Chadwick Boseman’s kinetic performance as "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business." Congrats, Chadwick: those are very big (and very active) shoes to fill. This is just the latest addition to a treasure trove of music biopics that have made some serious box office noise over the decades. Below are ten that deserve a debut or encore performance on your home screen. Pick one, and give your eyes and ears a treat.  

A great screenwriting professor once told me, “A screenplay is like a chalk drawing – it’s a beautiful thing until they stomp all over it like a bunch of circus ponies.” Many writers can be precious with their work, but to the typewriter-jamming chagrin of some Hollywood screenwriters, a movie is a living thing, and sometimes changes have to happen at the very last split-second – even as film is rolling.