Category: Film

  • The 15 best coming-of-age films

    Few stories, cinematic or otherwise, have proved as enduring 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. Black comedies give us the luxury of doing both. Gallows humor isn’t merely a coping mechanism; laughter can be empowering. By pushing the comic possibilities of the tragic and the taboo, filmmakers such as Joel and Ethan Coen or Todd Solondz don’t conceal uncomfortable…

  • The 10 most memorable movie marriages

    Cinema excels at depicting dysfunctional marriages, but much less so at portraying the other kind. Make of that what you will. Of course, the warts-and-all approach might be preferable to the days back when the Production Code governed onscreen social norms. According to the Hollywood of yesteryear, happily married couples slept in separate twin beds…

  • The 10 best male buddy films

    Cole  Porter called friendship the perfect blendship, but the movies haven’t painted it as quite so rosy, at least not in the decades since Bob Hope and Bing Crosby charmed 1940s-era audiences with their popular “Road to …” pictures. Films about male friendships often feel elegiac, as if male bonding cannot possibly last. When they’re…

  • The best movies of 2025!

    For cinephiles, 2025—much as with nearly every other facet of society—was not for the faint of heart. Netflix’s intended purchase of Warner Brothers Discovery has ominous implications for the long-term future of movie theaters. The introduction last September of a fully AI-generated actress named Tilly Norwood flipped out Hollywood for a period. New ideas continued…