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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…
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The 10 best movies based on real-life crimes (that don’t involve serial killers)
From streaming docuseries to podcasts, books to social media deep dives, true crime is everywhere. The movies have long understood the lurid appeal of such tales. The first film to explore the topic might be 1901’s Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison, in which Edison Studios staged a reenactment of President McKinley’s assassin,…
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The 10 best female buddy films
Big-screen portrayals of female friendship are far less common than those of their male counterparts—unless, that is, the female buddy movie revolves around romance. When not focused on menfolk and how to snag one, the movies of classic Hollywood were often flat-out ambivalent about friendships among women. Even some of the best of classic Hollywood,…
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The 10 best conspiracy films
It’s no surprise that the 1970s were the salad days of the conspiracy movie. In the wake of political assassinations, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and sundry revelations of CIA shenanigans, Americans were poised to believe the very worst about their government. Conspiracy-minded movies, like conspiracy theories themselves, continue to thrive because they offer…
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The 10 best screwball comedies
From car radios to Social Security, some good things emerged from the Great Depression––the screwball comedy being one of them. After all, the genre was very much about humiliating the upper-class. Painting the nation’s wealthy as ridiculous, eccentric and stupid was more than welcome when millions of Americans were out of work or losing their…
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach
Let’s talk about movies.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 