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The 10 best road-trip movies
“I take the open road. Healthy, free, the world before me,” wrote the poet Walt Whitman, long before anyone in Hollywood even thought about shooting a road-trip movie. The road is a potent storytelling metaphor. It conjures journeys both external and internal. It symbolizes freedom, reinvention, and escape––or just a place to get your kicks…
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The 10 best films about Black and white America
First, my disclaimer. I am a white guy and, therefore, have a very limited perspective on what it means to be anything other than a white guy in America. The “race issue” in America is a tidy phrase for an untidy reality. The original sins of this nation are the enslavement of Black Americans and the…
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The 10 best films about identity crises
Who am I? Questions surrounding one’s sense of self have long preoccupied the arts, but the theme is especially piquant in the movies. Characters are played by actors who are projected on screens that we then watch and interpret. With film itself built on layers of performance and illusion, it only follows that cinema is…
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The 20 best Pre-Code movies
Handwringing over Hollywood is as old as Hollywood itself. In 1930, the movie studios acquiesced to religious and civic organizations and promised to clean up their act. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), under the stewardship of former U.S. Postmaster General Will H. Hays, established the Motion Picture Production Code to set…
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The 10 best hard-R comedies
Let’s not beat around the bush. Dirty jokes are pretty damn funny. The best R-rated comedies aren’t just crude, however. They’re giddily transgressive, pushing past politeness and dragging the audience along with them. Laughter is the best medicine, but sometimes adults need something a little stronger than aspirin or a Z-Pak. These are my picks…
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The 10 best political films
Political junkies love movies about politics, but the dirty little secret is that so do a lot of folks who claim to hate politics. The reason is simple. The best political films are about power, not policy. Elections determine power, and power shapes lives and cinema thrives on that tension. From the populist rise of…
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The 10 best movies about the workplace
Americans spend about one-third of their lives at work. That translates to roughly 90,000 hours, although in fairness that figure probably includes plenty of time spent watching the clock and scrolling through TikTok. The workplace, being such a huge chunk of modern existence, is ripe for melodrama and farce, and everything in between. What follows…
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The 10 best movies about infidelity
As a general rule, any violation of one of the 10 Commandments tends to be great story material. There’s a reason cheating has long been a mainstay of literature, film and television, not to mention about 90% of the lyrics that have come out of Nashville. Infidelity is catnip for storytellers. The stakes are baked…
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach
Let’s talk about movies.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 