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The 20 best performances by a child actor
W.C. Fields famously advised against ever working with children or animals. While any discussion of thespian animals can wait for another day, I come in defense of child actors, many of whom have delivered outstanding performances in the movies. One hopes the gifted young actors listed below weren’t subjected to the sort of head games…
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The 10 best mindfuck films
The label of “mindfuck films” didn’t really come around until the late 1990s, but moviemakers were producing mindfucks as far back as 1929, when surrealists like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí were slicing a calf’s eyeball in Un Chien Andalou. But one doesn’t have to resort to such extremes to make a mindfuck. For purposes…
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The 10 best films about memory
Spanish philosopher George Santayana famously cautioned that those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it, but cinema is much more ambivalent about memory. In the movies, memories can be imprisoning or freeing—or simply untrustworthy. While memory always factors into storytelling, the film titles below have tackled the subject in particularly interesting ways.…
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The 10 best films about filmmaking
It’s hardly surprising that an industry devoted to mythmaking has long been fascinated with its own self-image. Movies about moviemaking are nearly as old as the medium itself, with “behind the scenes” comedies about Hollywood appearing as early as the 1910s. Viewpoints vary widely, however, ranging from valentines like Singin’ in the Rain and Day…
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The 10 most memorable masturbation scenes in film
“Don’t knock masturbation,” says Woody Allen’s character in 1977’s Annie Hall. “It’s sex with someone I love.” Despite such sentiment, the movies haven’t generally been comfortable with self-gratification, aside from using it for some good one-liners. Still, onanism is part of the human experience, and so cinema has not completely ignored it. The first unambiguous…
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The 10 best films on the immigrant’s experience
Few issues in the political arena are as polarizing as immigration. Its divisiveness, particularly the never-ending debate over illegal immigration, can obscure the real hardships—the physical journey, prejudice, assimilation to a new country while maintaining one’s cultural identity—that typically define the immigrant experience. Regardless of where one comes down on the subject, there is no…
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The 10 best movies about fake history
Ever since 1915, when D.W. Griffith transformed the Ku Klux Klan into Civil War heroes for The Birth of a Nation, cinema and historical accuracy have had a slippery relationship. Movies have the power to clarify the past and edify the public, but they can also be full of hooey. Sometimes the lies are fully…
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The 10 best gangster pictures
Crime doesn’t pay? Try telling that to filmmakers. The gangster movie is among cinema’s most enduring genres, offering audiences the vicarious thrill of being bad. Its Golden Age came in the 1930s, when hard-edged, Pre-Code pictures such as Little Caesar, The Public Enemy and Scarface: The Shame of a Nation introduced a rogue’s gallery of…
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach
Let’s talk about movies.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 