Richard Corliss, the longtime film critic for Time Magazine, died on Thursday. He was 71.

Corliss suffered a stroke last week and died in New York City Thursday night. He is survived by his wife Mary Corliss and brother Paul Corliss.

“It’s painful to try to find words, since Richard was such a master of them,” Time editor Nancy Gibbs wrote in a letter to staff. “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. It’s not clear that Richard ever slept, for the sheer expanse of his knowledge and writing defies the normal contours of professional life.”

Time theater critic Richard Zoglin wrote a moving tribute to Corliss and his 35 years of work at the magazine. Zoglin noted that, for Corliss, watching movies was pure joy and no other writer was better at presenting that feeling.

“He savored it all: the good, the bad, the indifferent,” Zoglin wrote. “Except that he was indifferent to nothing. To any fan or friend who would ask whether a new movie was ‘worth seeing,’ Corliss had a stock, succinct reply: ‘Everything is worth seeing.’ He meant it.”

Corliss was a champion for auteurs like Ingmar Bergman and Werner Herzog, but he also loved Disney films and the blockbusters by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. He wrote cover stories on film, wrote negative reviews of movies people flocked to see and pointed out why the great ones are great.

Corliss, who joined Time in 1980, also wrote books. His first ones were Talking Pictures and Greta Garbo. In 2014, he published Mom in the Movies, about how mothers are portrayed in film. His Time.com work included 5,000-word essays called “That Old Feeling” that looked back at past pop culture icons.

The Tom Hardy film Child 44 was the subject of his last review. It’s a negative review, but one filled with great lines, especially when it comes to the film’s running time.

“Some two-hour-plus movies are compact enough to resist cutting; Child 44 is a work that spectators could trim as they watch it, scene by scene,” Corliss wrote of the film. “So extended are the pauses between sentences, so torpid the pace even of the chase scenes. You end up in the role of a film editor handed the very rough cut of what could be a decent movie.”

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