Category: Film

  • The 10 best films about artificial intelligence

    Revolutionary boon or scourge that will destroy the world? The subject of artificial intelligence tends to elicit strong opinions. Cinema has been leery of AI since 1927’s Metropolis, when a robot schemed to manipulate the working classes into doing the bidding of their masters. That suspicion echoed through successive decades of movies that produced malevolent…

  • 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, curious sounds, maybe a ghost or 13… Who doesn’t love a good haunted house story? 10. The Changeling (1980,  dir. Peter Medak) George C. Scott plays John Russell, a composer and university music professor mourning the deaths of his wife and daughter in a car accident. As every widower knows, nothing…

  • The 10 best films about sex workers

    The movies have come a long way since the days of the “hooker with a heart of gold” archetype that populated westerns and gangster flicks. Sex workers have been a mainstay of film, but their treatment has transformed dramatically over decades. World cinema’s examination of sex workers has been more realistic and ambiguous than that…

  • The 10 best films about the theater

    When Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” that guy was really onto something. Not only is the artifice of the theater a nifty microcosm for life, but it lends itself to great drama: naked ambition, professional rivalries, the hunger for applause. Pre-Code Hollywood understood the appeal…

  • The 15 best film noir

    Film noir didn’t know it was film noir. French critics coined the term after World War II to describe a cycle of American crime pictures steeped in shadows and cynicism, but the filmmakers themselves were simply reflecting a changed world. Inspired by the starkness of German Expressionism—many noir directors were German émigrés who had fled…