Category: Film

  • The 10 most memorable U.S. presidents in film

    The U.S. presidency has long been one of Hollywood’s favorite subjects for drama—and comedy, too, for that matter. Presidents both real and fictitious have inspired reverence and ridicule in cinema; and like politics itself, perceptions can be fluid. Take, for instance, 1933’s Gabriel Over the White House, in which Walter Huston plays a proudly fascist…

  • The 15 best films that explore class divides

    The silent-era comedies of Charlie Chaplin were not simply about an unlucky fellow with a funny waddle and mustache; his Little Tramp character highlighted the indignities heaped upon the poor. Cinema has a rich tradition of highlighting the divisions between haves and have-nots. During the Great Depression, screwball comedies goosed the upper-class to the delight…

  • The 10 best films based on real-life crimes (that don’t involve serial killers or organized crime)

    From streaming docuseries and podcasts to books and social-media deep dives, true crime is everywhere. Movies recognized the sensational appeal early. One of cinema’s first true-crime reenactments came in 1901 with Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison, in which Edison Studios combined actual footage of the prison with a staged depiction of President…

  • 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,…

  • 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 films

    “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…