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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…
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10 memorable movie fathers
Movie dads, like everything and everyone else on the big screen, are a reflection of their time. That’s why the all-knowing patriarchs of Life with Father and To Kill a Mockingbird in classic American cinema began to recede with the emergence of New Hollywood in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Suddenly fathers became more…
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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’m a white guy and, therefore, have a limited perspective on what it means to be anything other than a white guy in America. The “race issue” in the United States is a tidy phrase for an untidy reality. The original sins of the 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…
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach
Let’s talk about movies.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 