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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, curious sounds, maybe a ghost or 13… Who doesn’t love a good haunted house story? 10. The Changeling (1980, dir. Peter Medak) George C. Scott plays John Russell, a composer and university music professor mourning the deaths of his wife and daughter in a car accident. As every widower knows, nothing…
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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…
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The 10 best films about the theater
When Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” that guy was really onto something. Not only is the artifice of the theater a nifty microcosm for life, but it lends itself to great drama: naked ambition, professional rivalries, the hunger for applause. Pre-Code Hollywood understood the appeal…
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The 15 best film noir
Film noir didn’t know it was film noir. French critics coined the term after World War II to describe a cycle of American crime pictures steeped in shadows and cynicism, but the filmmakers themselves were simply reflecting a changed world. Inspired by the starkness of German Expressionism—many noir directors were German émigrés who had fled…
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The 10 best films about voyeurism
In cinema, where we watch characters who don’t know they are being watched, voyeurism is a feature and not a bug. It isn’t surprising, then, that movies often explore the implications of being a voyeur. Some filmmakers, particularly Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma, made it a cornerstone of their works. “When you’re watching something…
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The 15 best slasher films
Slasher flicks can be traced back to the unnervingly intimate killers of Psycho and Peeping Tom, but the modern template snapped into place with Halloween, which transformed murder into a kind of ritualized stalking game. The late 1970s and early ’80s were the genre’s glory days, thanks partly to simple economics—low budgets, high returns—and perhaps…
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The 15 best neo-noir films
While film noir didn’t know it was film noir, neo-noir knows exactly what it is—and that self-consciousness is both its power and its risk. A self-aware descendant, it transplants noir’s dark soul to new eras, locales, and cultures, made by directors who grew up worshipping Bogart and Bacall and are now in on the joke.…
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach
Let’s talk about movies.
