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The 10 best performances by film directors (not typically known for acting)
Scores of great actors have transitioned to equally successful careers directing—Clint Eastwood, John Cassavetes, Orson Welles, Ron Howard, Rob Reiner, Greta Gerwig, and Jordan Peele, to name just a few—but the jump from behind the camera to in front of it is much less common. When it does happen, the result can be revelatory. Hence,…
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The 10 best car chases on film
There’s no thrill in cinema quite as purely visceral as a great car chase. Tires screeching, crunching metal, imminent disaster—you know the drill. Comics had been staging chases for laughs since the days of the Keystone Kops, but the movies’ modern-day car chase as we know it didn’t really come about until 1968’s Bullitt, when director…
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The 10 best films that contemplate an afterlife
Who among us hasn’t wondered what, if anything, awaits us after we shuffle off this mortal coil? In cinema’s earliest days, pioneering French filmmaker Georges Méliès got there fast, depicting a literal “tour of hell” with The Damnation of Faust in 1898 and its 1903 remake Faust aux enfers. By the middle of the 20th…
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The 20 best kiss scenes in film
Thomas Edison helped popularize the lightbulb and the phonograph, but cinephiles can also thank him for the first on-camera kiss. The historic smooch came at the inventor’s movie studio in 1896, when stage actors May Irwin and John Rice reenacted a scene from a play for the 23-second short, “The Kiss.” Despite the scandal it…
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The 20 best needle drops in film
Although “needle drop” initially referred to lowering a phonograph needle onto a vinyl record, the term has since expanded to describe the use of preexisting music in place of an original film score. Because we come to the movie theater with our own cultural baggage regarding certain tunes, a preexisting song can do a lot…
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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.…
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach
Let’s talk about movies.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 