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Time magazine film critic Richard Corliss died Thursday night in New York City after a stroke. He was 71. Corliss worked as a film critic for Time for 35 years, and is survived by his wife, Mary Corliss, also a film critic, and his brother, Paul. Time editor Nancy Gibbs made the announcement in an email to the staff Friday morning. "It’s painful to try to find words, since Richard was such a master of them," Gibbs wrote. "They were his tools, his toys, to the point that it felt sometimes as though he had to write, like the rest of us breathe and eat and sleep." Time also has a touching tribute from theater critic Richard Zoglin, who calls Corliss an "indestructible, inexhaustible resource" for the magazine. Zoglin relays one delightful anecdote where, because of an "arcane" rule, Corliss couldn't add the names of two correspondents who had helped report a story he had written.

The 10th Anniversary Ebertfest begins tonight in Urbana-Champaign. It is with some melancholy that I write these words on a legal pad in a hospital bed in Chicago. After consulting with my doctors, I have decided it may not be prudent to try to make the journey today with a fractured hip.

Sigh. I was really happy with this one. The films, the guests, the friends. Chaz, Nate Kohn, Mary Susan Britt and I had all the pieces in place. The only tweak I didn’t have time for was a proper full-length review of “Shotgun Stories.” It was on the to-do list. What I’m using now is what I wrote after seeing it at the Chicago Film Festival. The rest is almost a turn-key operation---the little festival that runs itself, with the help of countless volunteers.

It’s hard to express what it means to me that the festival is in my hometown.