Category: Film

  • The 10 best alien encounter films (that aren’t about invasion)

    Is there life on other planets? Judging by most films over the years, one would think humans are terrified by that possibility. Cinema’s default on space aliens has been hostile. For science-fiction of the 1950s, preoccupations with the Cold War and atomic nightmares tended to envision little green men as being bent on world domination.…

  • The 10 best serial-killer films

    Serial killers fascinate and terrify us. Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and the BTK killer are disturbingly recognizable—monsters who are human in every outward respect. Early serial-killer films like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) and Fritz Lang’s M (1931) created a blueprint for a genre that exploded in popularity alongside…

  • The 10 best prison films

    Few settings are as innately dramatic as prison, where freedom is the only currency that matters and the struggle to maintain humanity amid a dehumanizing system plays out in brutal relief. The genre has been a movie staple since at least 1930, when MGM’s The Big House essentially set the template, made a star of…

  • The 10 best films about artificial intelligence

    Revolutionary improvement of life? Scourge of humanity that will kill jobs, decimate the environment, and impede creativity? Meteoric advancements in artificial intelligence don’t lend themselves to soft opinions. Cinema has been skeptical of AI since 1927’s Metropolis, when a robot took on the guise of a seductive woman to manipulate the working class into doing…

  • The 10 most memorable movie teachers

    There isn’t typically much middle ground when it comes to teachers in the movies. They tend to be inspirational or tyrannical. There’s one trait, however, they share: influence. The classroom is one of the few places where a single person can shape scores of lives at once, which is why cinema has produced some unforgettable…

  • The 20 best hangout films

    Sometimes you just want to be with a film. Quentin Tarantino is often credited with popularizing the term “hangout movie” back in a New Yorker profile where he referenced the 1959 western Rio Bravo (see #6 below). What’s a hangout movie, you ask? A movie you can chill with and return to. A movie whose…

  • The 10 best summer films

    With all due respect to the other three seasons, there’s a reason summer has been so often commemorated in cinema, literature, and music. The long days, blazing heat, and languorous pace have become part of our collective mythology. Summer is a time for vacations and road trips, first loves and teary goodbyes, sleepaway camps and…

  • The 10 best haunted-house films

    Creaking floors, hidden passageways, strange sounds, maybe a ghost or 13 … who doesn’t love a juicy haunted-house story? Cinema quickly jumped on the genre with adaptations of literary works, two of the earliest and most notable silents being 1927’s The Cat and the Canary and 1928’s The Fall of the House of Usher. The…