Spanish philosopher George Santayana famously cautioned that those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it, but cinema is much more ambivalent about memory. In the movies, memories can be imprisoning or freeing—or simply untrustworthy. While memory always factors into storytelling, the film titles below have tackled the subject in particularly interesting ways.…

“Don’t knock masturbation,” says Woody Allen’s character in 1977’s Annie Hall. “It’s sex with someone I love.” Despite such sentiment, the movies haven’t generally been comfortable with self-gratification, aside from using it for some good one-liners. Still, onanism is part of the human experience, and so cinema has not completely ignored it. The first unambiguous…

Few issues in the political arena are as polarizing as immigration. Its divisiveness, particularly the never-ending debate over illegal immigration, can obscure the real hardships—the physical journey, prejudice, assimilation to a new country while maintaining one’s cultural identity—that typically define the immigrant experience. Regardless of where one comes down on the subject, there is no…