Category: Film

  • 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…

  • The 10 best films about voyeurism 

    In cinema, where we watch characters who don’t know they are being watched, voyeurism is a feature and not a bug. It isn’t surprising, then, that movies often explore the implications of being a voyeur.  Some filmmakers, particularly Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma, made it a cornerstone of their works. “When you’re watching something…

  • The 15 best slasher films

    Slasher flicks can be traced back to the unnervingly intimate killers of Psycho and Peeping Tom, but the modern template snapped into place with Halloween, which transformed murder into a kind of ritualized stalking game. The late 1970s and early ’80s were the genre’s glory days, thanks partly to simple economics—low budgets, high returns—and perhaps…

  • The 15 best neo-noir films

    The film noir that emerged from Hollywood in the years after World War II did not know it was film noir. Influenced by the moody, bleak visual style of German Expressionism—indeed, many noir directors were German émigrés who had fled the Nazi regime—crime thrillers like Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Out of…

  • The 15 best revenge films

    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…

  • The 10 best films 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…