Category: Film

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 10 memorable movie fathers

    Movie dads, like everything and everyone else on the big screen, reflect their time. That’s why the all-knowing patriarchs of Life with Father (1947) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) in classic American cinema began to recede with the emergence of New Hollywood in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Our relationships with movie fathers…

  • 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 metaphor. It symbolizes growth, freedom, reinvention and escape––or just a place to get your kicks (if you’re on Route 66, anyway)––but the…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • The 20 best Pre-Code movies

    Handwringing over Hollywood is as old as Hollywood itself. In 1930, the movie studios acquiesced to religious and civic organizations and promised to clean up their act. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), under the stewardship of former U.S. Postmaster General Will H. Hays, established the Motion Picture Production Code to set…

  • The 10 best R-rated comedies

    Let’s not beat around the bush. Dirty jokes are pretty damn funny. The best R-rated comedies aren’t just crude, however. They’re giddily transgressive, pushing past politeness and dragging the audience along with them. Laughter is the best medicine, but sometimes adults need something a little stronger than aspirin or a Z-Pak. These are my picks…