Category: Film

  • The 10 best bathroom scenes in film

    Bathrooms: We all use ‘em, but it took a curiously long time for Hollywood to challenge the Production Code’s ban on showing them on screen. Once that changed, however (we have Sir Alfred Hitchcock to thank for that, by the way), bathrooms have gotten their close-up. And why not? It’s where we’re most private and…

  • The 25 best love stories in film

    This just in: Moviegoers love romance. Beginning with The Kiss in 1896, cinema has excavated emotional gold from affairs of the heart. Big-screen love stories are so pervasive, in fact, that most of us know the tropes by heart (pun intended), from the meet-cute to that inevitable climax in which someone, usually male, makes a…

  • The 10 best films about time travel

    Time travel movies aren’t really about time. Yes, the idea of moving through time is fantastical, but such stories are conduits to explore themes as diverse as nostalgia, regret, fate and free will. These are my picks for the 10 best movies about time travel. 10. My Old Ass (2024, dir: Megan Park) “If I…

  • The 15 best coming-of-age films

    Few stories, cinematic or otherwise, have proved as indispensable as coming of age. There are countless variations, of course: a first love or heartbreak, a reckoning with mortality, learning a truth about a parent or friend, discovering right and wrong. You get the idea. Regardless of the particulars, the best coming-of-age stories endure because growing…

  • The 15 best school-centric films

    For good or ill––or, more accurately, for good and ill––school is a foundational building block of who we become. The classroom is where we learn to read, write, and do arithmetic, of course, but the instruction does not end there. There are critical lessons to be had in the cafeteria, the locker rooms, the playground:…

  • The 10 best film dystopias

    It can always be worse. At least, that’s what moviegoers have long told themselves, and so there is a weird comfort that comes from losing yourself in big-screen dystopias. Fritz Lang likely jumpstarted the genre in 1927 with Metropolis’ tale of haves and have-nots, but speculative pessimism quickly caught on in cinema. Like the best…

  • The 10 best journalism films

    Long before journalism was reshaped by the internet and culture wars, movies about reporters tended to depict them as stalwart crusaders for the people’s right to know or as doughy cynics in ill-fitting suits who chain-smoke, wisecrack, and swig cheap liquor from flasks hidden in their desk drawers. The genre has grown more conflicted since,…

  • The 10 best black comedies

    You have to laugh to keep from crying, the saying goes, but black comedies give us the luxury of doing both. Gallows humor isn’t solely a coping mechanism. Laughter can be empowering. Moreover, by nudging the comic possibilities of the tragic and the taboo, purveyors of dark comedy don’t conceal uncomfortable truths––they expose them. Below…