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The 15 best film noir
Film noir didn’t know it was film noir. The term was coined by French critics after World War II to describe a cycle of American crime pictures steeped in shadow and cynicism, but the filmmakers themselves were simply reflecting a changed world. Drawing on the starkness of German Expressionism, the films traded in hard contrasts:…
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The 10 best films about voyeurism
In cinema, where we watch characters who don’t know they are being watched, voyeurism is a feature and not a bug. It isn’t surprising, then, that movies often explore the implications of being a voyeur. Some filmmakers, particularly Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma, have made it a cornerstone of their works. “When you’re watching…
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The 15 best slasher movies
Slasher flicks can be traced back to the unnervingly intimate killers of Psycho and Peeping Tom, but the modern template snapped into place with Halloween, which transformed murder into a kind of ritualized stalking game. The late 1970s and early ’80s were the genre’s glory days, thanks partly to simple economics—low budgets, high returns—and perhaps…
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The 15 best neo-noir films
The film noir that emerged from Hollywood in the years after World War II did not know it was film noir. Influenced by the moody, bleak visual style of German Expressionism—indeed, many noir directors were German émigrés who had fled the Nazi regime—crime thrillers like Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Out of…
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The 15 best revenge movies
Revenge is one of the oldest, most durable engines in storytelling. From The Lion King to John Wick, movie audiences have made it clear they like that eye-for-an-eye business. At least they do on that giant screen in the darkened theater, where moviegoers find complicit satisfaction in vengeance being served. Maybe part of the draw…
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The 10 best movies about dreams
“Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams,” mused the great Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini. “Years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image.” It only makes sense, then, that a medium with such similarities…
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The 10 most memorable U.S. presidents in film
The U.S. presidency is one of cinema’s more enduring subjects for drama—and comedy, too, for that matter. Presidents both real and fictitious have inspired reverence and ridicule in movies, which mirrors how Americans tend to view the office. And like politics itself, perceptions can be fluid. Take, for example, 1933’s Gabriel Over the White House,…
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The 15 best films that explore class divides
The silent-era comedies of Charlie Chaplin were not simply about a hapless fellow with a funny waddle and mustache; his Little Tramp character highlighted the indignities heaped upon the poor. Cinema has a rich tradition of highlighting the divisions between haves and have-nots. During the Great Depression, screwball comedies goosed the upper-class to the delight…
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach
Let’s talk about movies.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 