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The 10 best serial-killer films
People are rightly terrified of serial killers, but they sure like to cozy up to them from a safe distance. Let’s face it, savagery is fascinating. Unlike gangsters, serial killers such as Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and the BTK killer seemed disturbingly recognizable—human in every outward respect. Early serial-killer pictures like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger:…
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The 10 best prison films
Few settings are as innately dramatic as prison, where freedom is the only currency that matters and the struggle to maintain humanity amid a dehumanizing system plays out in brutal relief. The genre has been a movie staple since at least 1930, when MGM’s The Big House essentially set the template, made a star of…
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The 10 best films about artificial intelligence
Revolutionary improvement of life? Scourge of humanity that will kill jobs, decimate the environment, and impede creativity? Meteoric advancements in artificial intelligence don’t lend themselves to soft opinions. Cinema has been skeptical of AI since 1927’s Metropolis, when a robot took on the guise of a seductive woman to manipulate the working class into doing…
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10 memorable movie teachers
Typically there isn’t much middle ground when it comes to teachers in the movies. Either they are inspirational heroes or tyrannical monsters. The template for the former came with 1939’s Goodbye Mr. Chips, in which Robert Donat played the eponymous teacher with considerable warmth (and aging makeup). There is one trait onscreen teachers tend to…
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The 20 best hangout films
Sometimes you just want to be with a film. Quentin Tarantino is often credited with popularizing the term “hangout movie” back in a New Yorker profile where he referenced the 1959 western Rio Bravo (see #6 below). What’s a hangout movie, you ask? A movie you can chill with and return to. A movie whose…
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The 10 best summer films
With all due respect to the other three seasons, there’s a reason summer has been so often commemorated in cinema, literature, and music. The long days, blazing heat, and languorous pace have become part of our collective mythology. Summer is a time for vacations and road trips, first loves and teary goodbyes, sleepaway camps and…
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The 10 best haunted-house films
Creaking floors, hidden passageways, strange sounds, maybe a ghost or 13 … who doesn’t love a juicy haunted-house story? Cinema quickly jumped on the genre with adaptations of literary works, two of the earliest and most notable silents being 1927’s The Cat and the Canary and 1928’s The Fall of the House of Usher. The…
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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…
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach
Let’s talk about movies.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 